The engineer who wrote to Pakistan's president about stents

A letter to the president

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Dr. Murtaza Najabat Ali — CEO of N-ovative Health Technologies, founding director of the Medical Devices Development Center (MDDC) at NUST, and professor of biomedical engineering — as someone whose story he had only recently discovered and was immediately struck by.

The origin story is remarkable in its simplicity. Dr. Murtaza grew up in Rawalpindi, studied biomedical engineering at UET Taxila, did a brief stint at Shaukat Khanum, worked for a year at a medical device distributor in Pakistan, and then left for a master’s degree at Brunel University in the UK. While there, he built a cardiac stent as part of a tripartite arrangement between a company, a university, and a lab. The experience lit something in him.

“Patriotically, bade emotional hokar, maine letter likha president ko,” he says — emotionally, out of patriotism, he wrote a letter to President Pervez Musharraf saying he wanted to do something back home. The letter was well received, circulated within the federal government, and eventually reached the chairman of NESCOM, Dr. Samar Mubarakmand. Dr. Murtaza flew back during Christmas 2006, was interviewed, and was hired to build a pilot-scale cardiac stent production facility at NESCOM. Within two and a half years, the facility was complete, stents were developed, Rotterdam trials were done, and a UK regulatory body came and certified the operation.

Then the momentum died. Dr. Samar Mubarakmand retired, and the drive to take the facility to commercial scale evaporated. Dr. Murtaza returned to the UK — Queen Mary University of London, then a PhD and post-doc at the University of Sheffield — before coming back again to establish the biomedical engineering department at NUST.

The stent scandal that changed everything

The second act of the story begins with a crisis. In 2016, expired stents were implanted in patients in Punjab. The Supreme Court took suo motu notice. The Prime Minister’s office began looking for whoever had previously built stents in Pakistan at a pilot scale. That search led back to Dr. Murtaza.

He was called to the Prime Minister’s office in 2017 alongside NUST’s director. Over two to three consecutive days of meetings — attended by the heads of every major federal institution including the FIA — he and his colleagues were treated as domain experts. The mandate that emerged was clear: submit a PC-1 to the Ministry of Science and Technology and build a purpose-built Medical Devices Development Center at NUST.

The reasoning behind choosing NUST was deliberate. “Pakistan mein research driven medical device industry exist hi nahi karti,” Dr. Murtaza explains — a research-driven medical device industry simply did not exist in Pakistan. NUST had the research infrastructure. Private sector had no culture of research-driven industry. The MDDC was funded, built, and inaugurated by the Prime Minister in 2020. N-ovative Health Technologies was then created as its commercial arm — a public sector company under the Planning Commission, tasked with supplying products into hospitals.

The triple helix model

Muzamil draws a parallel to the Chinese model of state-academia-industry coordination and asks the sharper question: how do you prevent this from becoming another PIA — a public sector entity that accumulates staff and produces nothing?

Dr. Murtaza’s answer is the triple helix model, an innovation framework he describes as the operating logic of developed economies. “Triple helix model is basically innovation model hai. Jisme sirf industry aur government milkar ek ecosystem ke andar economic stability nahi lekar aa rahe hain, balki usme university has become one of the major actors in that.” University, industry, and government working together — not sequentially but simultaneously — to identify societal gaps and produce cost-effective, indigenous solutions.

He points to NUST’s Science and Technology Park as a live example: multinational and national companies are parked there with setups integrated directly into NUST’s research labs, solving their industrial problems through academic collaboration. The MDDC itself, he argues, has already implemented this model — his academic research labs are integrated with the government-funded development center, and N-ovative Health Technologies handles commercialization and supply.

Private sector companies, he notes, have now started approaching them for equity-based partnerships. “I think it’s high time that private sector — yeh barrier, mental barrier cross ho chuka hua hai.”

The Sialkot paradox and the import trap

One of the most striking moments in the conversation comes when Dr. Murtaza describes Pakistan’s surgical instrument industry in Sialkot. It covers more than 60% of global demand. And yet: “They are not selling even one product with their own name.”

Semi-finished goods leave Pakistan, get polished, labeled, branded, and certified abroad, and return as expensive imports. The same item that left for ten rupees comes back for a thousand. The mental barrier, he argues, has been decades in the making — a belief that medical device manufacturing requires regulatory frameworks too complex, professionals too specialized, and infrastructure too expensive for Pakistan to manage.

That barrier has started to crack. DRAP — the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan — has evolved significantly. It now has a dedicated medical devices and cosmetics department with its own inspectors. N-ovative Health Technologies holds a manufacturing license from DRAP and a certification from a UK-based accreditation agency. The regulatory ecosystem, while still imperfect, is no longer the obstacle it once was.

The pricing impact has been immediate. Before the MDDC’s inauguration, imported stents were being sold at Rs 150,000 to Rs 250,000 with no regulation. After the center opened, imported companies dropped their prices sharply. Drug-eluting stents from American and European manufacturers now sit in the Rs 40,000–50,000 range. For balloon catheters, the imported price runs Rs 7,000–11,000; N-ovative produces and retails the same at Rs 5,000–6,000.

Raw materials and the limits of one platform

Muzamil pushes on the next bottleneck: 80–85% of raw materials are still imported. Is Dr. Murtaza planning to localize those too, the way the automotive industry gradually localizes components?

The answer is honest about limits. “Har cheez ek platform par nahi ho sakti.” Not everything can happen on one platform. The raw material problem belongs to entities already dealing in materials — chemical engineers, material scientists, industries adjacent to agriculture or automotive. What he can do is demonstrate that the end product is viable. The raw material supply chain is a separate initiative that requires its own champions, its own government policy support, and its own private-public partnership.

He draws the parallel to pharma: active pharmaceutical ingredients are almost entirely imported from China and India. Pakistan assembles tablets and capsules. If the supply chain were cut tomorrow, the entire pharma industry would stop. Medical devices face the same structural vulnerability. Solving it requires policy attention at the raw material level — not just at the finished product level.

Cancer, purpose, and the Quran

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks about a health episode in Dr. Murtaza’s life. The answer is direct: in 2013, he was diagnosed with stage one testicular cancer. Surgery, chemotherapy, three to four months bedridden. He was working at NUST at the time and returned to work by the end of that year, with quarterly and six-monthly screenings continuing for two to three years.

“That has given me more focus and more sort of a mission in life — ki ab yeh wakai karna hai.”

He describes a pre-existing spiritual alignment that the illness deepened. He had become a practicing Muslim in his late teens — the first in his family to pray five times a day — and had been influenced significantly by Dr. Israr Ahmed, whom he eventually met in person. After the cancer, he started a club called “Being Momin” at NUST, running Quranic study sessions and discussion talks for students and faculty focused on social and spiritual rehabilitation.

His argument about spiritual decline is precise. The problem is not irreligion — it is cosmetic religion. “Hum Quran ko ek decoration piece bana di hai. Ghar mein lahaf banakar rakha hota hai.” The Quran has become a decorative object. The depth — the philosophy of life, the purpose it provides — goes unexplored. He distinguishes between religion (faith, modes of worship, cultural heritage) and deen (religion plus social system, economic system, political system). Pakistan, he argues, has the former but not the latter. The country was founded in the name of Islam but operates no system — social, economic, or political — that reflects deen.

Engineers making food, and what that means

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil raises a pattern he keeps noticing: engineering graduates running restaurants, doing content creation, picking up cameras. He mentions a restaurant in the building called “Two Broke Engineers.” Dr. Murtaza’s response is not dismissive — it is diagnostic.

Young people come to him with ambitious, Stanford-inspired ideas. His consistent advice: “Pakistan is severely lagging behind the world. Abhi this is need of the hour ki hum yahan par apne jo fundamental basic societal problems hain unka solution dein through academic research.” Don’t chase the frontier. Solve the problem in front of you. A failed experiment on a local problem is more valuable than a successful experiment on an imported idea, because the demand is real and the next iteration has a foundation.

“Setbacks ke andar aur ek badi ek unfavorable circumstances ke andar yeh opportunities baithi padi hoti hain aur aapko woh dig out karni padti hai.”

He is equally clear about what the country needs from its youth: not waiting for top-down change, not blaming government or private sector exclusively, but picking one societal problem — a product, a service, any form — and working on it with consistency. “Yeh aane wale ek do decades mein aap dekhenge ki ek major landscape change ho jaega iska.”

Muzamil closes by asking how Dr. Murtaza sees Pakistan in 2050. The answer is cautiously optimistic — not because the system will fix itself, but because ground-up individual consistency, compounded over one to two decades, produces landscape change. The proof of concept already exists. A man wrote a letter to a president, built a stent facility twice, survived cancer, and is now selling balloon catheters at half the imported price. The question is whether enough others will decide to start.