Co-Founder and Co-Executive DirectorI-MAK
The son of a factory worker from a small, working-class mining town in the North of England, Tahir Amin is an attorney with more than 25 years of experience in intellectual property law. He practiced as a solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales with two of the leading IP firms in the United Kingdom, and served as in-house global IP counsel for multinational corporations. From this vantage point, Amin could see clearly how systems are shaped by those with the most resources—and how those outcomes often come at the expense of those with the least. In 2004, Amin gave up his lucrative job in London and moved to Bangalore, India, where he was instrumental to the passage of a health-friendly patent law. That process led him to eventually co-found I-MAK, with the express purpose of re-shaping patent law to better serve the public.
Amin’s pioneering work challenging patents has established a new model for treatment access, one that restores balance to the system by upending the structural power dynamics that allow inequities to persist. He has served as legal advisor/consultant to many groups, including the European Patent Office, United Nations Environment Programme and World Health Organisation. He is a former Harvard Medical School Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine and was a 2009 TED Fellow. Amin is a frequent speaker on patent policy and rising drug prices, and has been featured in CNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.