He has two “uniforms”. The everyday boubou and the Western start-up outfit he wears when we meet him in Paris on the occasion of one of his rare business visits. He also has two nationalities, the original one, French, and for a few weeks a brand new one, Ivorian, which makes him happy. “and very proud”. Arnaud Pourredon, 26, intended for a time in public health medicine, chose to give more meaning to his existence by fighting against fake drugs in Africa with the weapons of his time: artificial intelligence and blockchain, a technology that stores and transmits information transparently and securely.
Difficult to explain, in a still short life, this 90 degree turn. He dates his first awareness of his trip to Nepal in 2015. While studying medicine in Bordeaux, he took part in a humanitarian operation after the terrible earthquakes of that year. He discovers on the spot “the disaster of counterfeit drugs, which cause each year, according to the World Health Organization, nearly a million deaths, but also a multitude of seriously ill patients”, he says. He also notes the powerlessness of doctors when they see pharmacies selling fake products without being aware of it. This subject still preoccupied him the following year when he did a hospital internship in Arusha, Tanzania. The quality of medicines “is not guaranteed”, he said. In 2017, a trip to Bolivia, still on an internship at the hospital, convinced him. “There, I discovered the parallel circuits of fake drugs online, the dark side of the Internet, the dark web”, he explains.
Entrepreneurial response
His decision is made. Weapons against weapons, it is with digital means that he will imagine an entrepreneurial response, create an application for pharmacists so that they can identify fake drugs. “It’s a way to potentially impact hundreds of millions of people,” he explains to justify this decision, taken to the chagrin of his mother. She had a hard time understanding that her son is turning away from a pre-determined future, after having passed his entrance exam on the first try, without private preparation. Having been elected one of the innovators of the year under 30 by the prestigious American university of MIT in 2019 is still not enough to reassure her. Even today, he admits to telling him that one day, perhaps, he will finish his studies to teach public health medicine.
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