Tina Valbh

Tina Valbh is a pharmacist and patient advocate with nearly three decades in the life-sciences industry. She is the managing partner of Pharma Connect, an advisory firm that helps manufacturers design patient-services and patient-access programs, and the founder and “chief inspiration officer” of Tina’s Warriors, a nonprofit that supports women undergoing cancer treatment.

A registered pharmacist, Valbh spent her career building the patient-access and patient-services programs that pharmaceutical companies wrap around their products, and was appointed as a specialized consultant to the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee. Her perspective changed when she became a patient herself: a cancer diagnosis, initially missed several times, exposed the gap between the patient-journey maps she had built professionally and the reality of navigating treatment.

Valbh appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Dr. Karla Loken, an OB-GYN and women’s-health leader, for a conversation on the gaps patients fall through, both of them speaking as industry insiders and as cancer survivors. Valbh’s central argument was that the industry’s “patient journey” is a fiction when patients are never actually at the table, and that the same companies racing to launch products under-invest in the education and medical-affairs work that patients and clinicians actually need.

She founded Tina’s Warriors, she said, because once she had lived the gaps she could no longer be numb to them: as someone inside the industry, she felt she had to be part of the solution or she was part of the problem. Her advocacy now centers on empowering patients to ask the right questions and pressing manufacturers to fund advocacy groups with evidence-based tools rather than treat them as a line item to cut.