Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze, MD, MPH, PhD
Founder and Chair of the Public Health Institute of Georgia. Professor of Public Health at David Tvildiani Medical University, where he still teaches today. Editor-in-Chief of the Georgian Medical Journal.
Before returning to build public health infrastructure in Georgia, he worked for over a decade with major international health organizations, including the World Health Organization and global health financing bodies — the kind of institutions that set the standards Sheni Labs is built to meet.
In his own words
“I’ve spent my career in public health, not in supplements. A few years ago, we started SupplementIndex to help Georgian consumers judge supplement quality for themselves. What we found was that even large, well-known companies weren’t giving people the information they were legally required to provide. We tried to fix that from the outside for years — publishing, educating, working with regulators, even offering companies free reviews to show they could be transparent. It didn’t change the market.”
“So we built Sheni Labs to answer the question directly: can a fully transparent, evidence-based supplement actually be made and sold here? It’s a real product and a real business — we intend for it to grow. But the profits it generates are reinvested into the Public Health Institute of Georgia, funding both our public health work and the next products in this line. That’s not charity — it’s the model. A business that’s genuinely transparent can fund the institution that keeps pushing the whole market toward transparency. That’s the bet we’re making.”
— Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze
