Five service areas, each described with enough specificity for a foundation program officer to know whether Kanan is the right fit for their program.
Most foundations work with Kanan in one of three ways:
I start with the field, along with the literature — structured conversations with your investigators, clinicians, and the Pharma partners who have or haven't engaged. At the Jain Foundation I contributed to a team-driven effort to build and steward a portfolio of 10+ programs covering the full path to a treatment: disease biology, preclinical and clinical testing, diagnosis, registries. I form my own view and present it with a recommendation, not a summary.
I begin with a landscape assessment — who is working on what, where the expertise sits, and where relationships that should exist don't. The output isn't a report; it's introductions, conference programs, data sharing agreements, and collaborative proposals that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
"What matters most happens in the hallways — a researcher and a clinician realizing they had exactly the cohort the other needed. You can't manufacture that. You can create the conditions for it."
At Wellcome Leap's 1kD program I coordinated ten global sites with a single data governance structure built at the start, so the program spent its time managing science, not confusion. At the Dup15q Foundation I synthesized scientific findings into board recommendations and communicated the difficult ones to investigators without damaging long-term relationships. I am both the scientific evaluator and the program manager — when I read a progress report, I see what's being said, what isn't, and whether a milestone was genuinely met or met on paper.
"A milestone review is not a verdict. It's the foundation's chance to catch a drift before it becomes a year of wasted funding — and the investigator's chance to make a case the donor will actually hear."
My job at this stage is to ask the hard questions a pharma partner would ask. Where does your science really stand? What's missing between your current research and a real conversation about a clinical trial? I help design trial-ready cohorts from registry and natural history data, structuring the information so patient populations are legible to external partners. Done rigorously, this is what makes the difference between a foundation that waits for pharma and one that earns the conversation.
Patient engagement is a two-way relationship. I listen to families' daily realities, to the gap between what they're being told and what they understand. That listening shapes content and tone. I've presented research updates at patient conferences across the US and India, managed social channels for rare disease communities, and communicated difficult news with the care those conversations require.
"Speaking to a patient community is not communication — it's care. Honest, careful, without false promises. A foundation that gets this right earns trust no marketing budget can buy."
A first conversation is a 30-minute call. I respond within 48 hours, and there's no commitment — it's how both sides figure out whether it's the right fit.