Cfo Thought Leader

As an Indian citizen living in the United States and working for a Dutch company, CFO Smital Shah frequently spends her days on conference calls with investors from Asia, Israel, or Europe. On every investor call, at every board meeting, and at every employee gathering, the same question gets asked: “How far is ProQR from serving patients?” Each time she hears this, the firm’s worldly finance leader provides a thoughtful and measured response. This is a question that punctuates the tenure of finance chiefs inside every clinical stage start-up, and one that Shah says has led her to seek out any synergies that she can between the finance function’s accounting and compliance processes and ProQR’s greater goal of creating medicines for patients who suffer from rare diseases. Shah asks: “How do we facilitate—within the confines of finance—what we need to do in order to achieve this?” ProQR expects to have collected the necessary data from its ongoing clinical trials to seek out approval for its new medicine from t