I did not set out to start a life sciences company. I set out to answer a question, and the company turned out to be the only honest way to answer it.
The question arrived during the first lockdown. I was working as COO at a cosmetic manufacturer, building brand stories for private-label clients — many of whom had no particular interest in skin, only in owning a skincare brand. The work was competent and largely hollow. When the world stopped, I had time to notice the hollowness, and underneath it a question I couldn’t put down: what is care, actually? Not as sentiment. As a function. Can a system learn to care — and if it can, what would that system look like?
I spent the next few years writing my way toward an answer. The book that came out of it, The Unspoken Laws of Aliveness, argues that every system which endures — a cell, a forest, a city, a company — does three things. It learns from feedback. It cares, meaning it responds in proportion to what it senses. And it integrates, holding difference without fracturing. Learn, care, integrate. Not moral instructions. Design principles.
Writing that down was one thing. Watching it fail in the field was another.
What the field taught me
Between the writing, our team travelled. Jharkhand, Haryana, Tripura, West Bengal, Maharashtra. We met chief ministers, women and child welfare ministers, tribal ministers, district collectors, anganwadi workers. We convened dialogue and raised awareness and found, almost everywhere, a combination of real sincerity and complete paralysis.
What stayed constant through all of it — through changing administrations, through officers being reassigned — was the thing we had come to look at. Rural women carrying recurrent urinary infections nobody discussed. Doctors so overworked they prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotics without waiting for a culture, because waiting meant losing the patient to the next clinic. Water infrastructure discharging largely untreated into the same rivers and groundwater that families drew from.
Look at that as three separate problems and you will fund three separate programmes, and none of them will hold. Look at it as one system and something clarifies. A woman washes with water that may already carry pathogens. She gets an infection. She treats it with a leftover strip of antibiotics, or one bought across a chemist’s counter without a prescription, because a diagnosis costs time and money she does not have. That course is incomplete and possibly the wrong drug, so it clears the sensitive bacteria and selects for the resistant ones — while also destroying the Lactobacillus population whose acidity was preventing the next infection. She is now more vulnerable than before she was treated. The discarded medicines and the untreated waste end up in the same environment, where bacteria exchange resistance genes with an efficiency our institutions cannot match.
Every step in that loop is a failure of feedback. Testing skipped, so nobody learns. Fear substituted for evidence, so nobody is truly cared for. Water, hygiene, education and medicine handled by separate departments that never speak, so nothing integrates. The bacteria, meanwhile, are learning continuously. They share what they find. They adapt faster than the systems built to contain them.
That was the moment the book stopped being a book. If the diagnosis is a broken feedback loop, then writing about it more elegantly does not close the loop. Something has to be built.
From principle to formulation
Neuriva exists to close loops like that one — to find where a country’s resources and health leak away because the root cause has gone unexamined, and to build something that actually holds.
In practice the three principles stop being philosophy very quickly and become decisions.
Learn means the research comes before the product, not after it. For Safe & Sure, that meant accepting an uncomfortable finding: prebiotics and probiotics for vaginal health had been tried internationally and had largely underdelivered. The easy conclusion was that the concept was wrong. The accurate one was that the concept was right and the delivery was wrong — beneficial bacteria introduced from outside rarely stay long enough to colonise. So we stopped trying to add bacteria and started trying to feed the ones already there, with a mucoadhesive that holds selective prebiotics in place long enough for resident Lactobacilli to ferment them and reclaim dominance. The body restores its own acidity. We are only holding the door open.
Care means responding in proportion, which in a regulated industry mostly means restraint. It means running a clinical trial rather than asserting an outcome. It means stating what an active has been shown to do and what it has not. It means designing for the woman who cannot change her water supply, rather than for the one who can.
Integrate means the product is never the whole intervention. An intimate wash does not fix municipal water. It does not undo the taboo that keeps a woman from describing her symptoms accurately to a doctor, or the economics that make a chemist cheaper than a diagnosis. Which is why education sits alongside everything we build, and why our AI work is aimed at making the science legible to the person using it rather than impressive to the person selling it.
HempNation came from the same method applied to a different leak. A workforce running on chronic stress, a nervous system that registers that stress in the skin through the TRPV1 pathway, and a downward spiral in which dulled skin lowers confidence and lowered confidence generates more stress. Treat the surface and the loop continues. Calm the signal and you have a chance of interrupting it.
Why I am writing this at all
I am aware that a founder pointing at his own book invites a certain scepticism, and I would rather name it than let it sit. The book is not evidence for anything Neuriva claims. Our claims rest on published research, on ingredient data, and on trials we are running and will publish whether or not the results flatter us.
What the book is, is the reason the company works the way it does. It is the record of a question I took seriously for several years before I had any commercial reason to. If you want to understand why we start with root causes when it would be faster and considerably cheaper not to — that is where the reasoning lives.
The rest of it, we are building.
— Shareeq Iqbal Khan, Founder & CEO, Neuriva Life Sciences
The Unspoken Laws of Aliveness: Life, Consciousness & a Radical Code for a World in Crisis — available on Amazon, Flipkart and Kindle.
