[6] The idea emerged from an Institute of Medicine panel chaired by economist Kenneth Arrow that called for global subsidies to ensure that artemisinin-based antimalarials were introduced to crowd out monotherapies that would result in resistance.

Through his prolific research, active public outreach and sustained policy engagement, Laxminarayan played a central role in bringing the issue of drug resistance to the attention of leaders and policymakers worldwide and to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2016.

Among other innovations, Laxminarayan and his colleagues were instrumental in creating the electronic vaccine intelligence network (eVIN) with pilots in Bareilly and Shahjahanpur.

eVIN is now the world's largest electronic vaccine logistics management system and covers all 731 districts across 36 states and union territories in the country.

In an oped published in the New York Times following the nationwide lockdown on March 24, 2020, Laxminarayan warned that India only had a few weeks to create an enormous, affordable and easily available testing infrastructure, contain local outbreaks and prepare for the avalanche of the coronavirus.

[24] In an interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, he predicted that it was "likely that Covid will just rip through the population, unless something fundamentally changes in the virus itself in India, for which we have no real evidence."

The campaign was supported by over 12,000 individual donors and large corporations including United Airlines, Logitech, UIPath, Yahoo and TechMahindra.

[28] In 2015, Laxminarayan founded HealthCubed, an award-winning start-up to improve access to healthcare and diagnosis for billions of people in both rich and poor countries.

HealthCubed was among 16 finalists (selected from 340 entrants) for the Trinity Challenge, which aimed to bring the power of data and analytics to identify, respond to, or recover from disease outbreaks in innovative ways.