Anna Titkova

Anna Titkova, MD, PhD, MBA, leads Pratia’s clinical research site network, overseeing operations across multiple European countries. A clinician and scientist by training, she previously built and led clinical research operations in Ukraine, and is a recognized voice on patient-centric clinical research and crisis management.

On Open Door Salon, Titkova drew on her experience running clinical operations in Ukraine when the 2022 invasion began. She described how trial shipments stopped almost overnight, leaving patients who depended on clinical research for their treatment without care, and how her team worked to transfer patients to sites outside the country that were never set up to receive them. She returned often to a single case, a young woman with Hodgkin lymphoma whose trial treatment was halted by the war, to make the point that the people inside clinical trials are not data points but the reason the work exists.

Her central argument is that the industry faces a choice during instability: build a global research ecosystem that stays inclusive, or retreat toward only the safest and easiest locations. Genetic diversity in trial arms and data drawn from many different health systems, she argues, matter both for equity and for the science itself. For displaced patients, she keeps returning to the most basic need, simply knowing where and how to find care, and she makes the case that health systems have to be built to adapt to whatever disruption comes next.

She frames leadership in a crisis not as having all of the answers, but as making the best decisions possible with imperfect information while keeping some humanity in the work.