Stephen William MacMahon is a British-Australian academic medical researcher, healthcare entrepreneur and founder of The George Institute for Global Health.
There, he worked in the Clinical Trials Services Unit of the Nuffield Department of Medicine with Professor Sir Richard Peto.
Both these trials showed that blood pressure-lowering treatment reduced the risks of serious cardiovascular disease outcomes in hypertensive and non-hypertensive patients.
[21] His collaborations with researchers across the Asia Pacific region also led him to suspect that treatment for cardiovascular diseases was likely to be inadequate in many low- and middle-income countries.
In parallel, his colleague, Robyn Norton, observed that the burden of injuries – particular that resulting from motor vehicle crashes – was also growing rapidly in many of the same countries, and, once again, it appeared that treatment for trauma was inadequate.
They recognised that the research base upon which to develop regionally relevant strategies for prevention and treatment of many of the most serious non-infectious conditions was extremely weak.
[23] Increasing the contribution of the private sector to improving the health of people in low- and middle-income counties has been one of MacMahon's long-term goals.
In 2019, he founded George Medicines Pty Ltd,[24] raising $53 million in private equity capital[25] to develop two new low-cost drug treatments for hypertension and diabetes.
Each of these treatments comprise combinations of ultra-low-doses of drugs with complementary mechanisms, designed to maximize benefits and minimize side effects.
MacMahon oversaw the design, development and conduct of the preclinical research programs that generated the evidence on which patents for both treatments are based.