Meet our dedicated team of founders, advisors, researchers, scientists, and staff who are working together from across continents towards achieving our mission of affordable medicines for all.
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Urmi Bajpai has a Ph.D. in Microbiology from University of Delhi, South Campus. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Science at Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, and the former Deputy Dean of Research at the Research council in University of Delhi, 2017-2018.
First in-charge of the department of Biomedical Science at ANDC; Urmi has 21 years of teaching experience. She pioneered the undergraduate research program in the college in 2006. She is Ph.D. supervisor and has been the Principal Investigator of several research projects funded by DBT, CSIR-OSDD, DU, DST (IEDC & SERB) and has established a well-equipped molecular biology laboratory in the college. Her team has been working towards i) finding new TB drug candidates with Mur enzymes in the cell wall biosynthesis pathway of Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the targets. They aim for finding drug candidates foe multi-target therapy; ii) exploring the potential of mycobacteriophages and their lytic enzymes (Endolysins) as the source of anti-bacterial agents. She is the co-founder of International Bacteriophage Research Consortium (IBRC) with Open Health System Laboratories (OHSL), USA. |
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Dr. Tanjore S. Balganesh was the Project Head of the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) Unit of CSIR, the national laboratory system of India. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, University of Calcutta, India and subsequently spent post-doctoral years with Dr. Sanford Lacks at Brookhaven National Laboratories Brookhaven (NY, USA). Later he was associated with Professor Thomas Trautner at the Max Plank Institute for Molecular Genetics at Berlin (Germany). He joined Astra Research Centre India as a Senior Scientist in 1987. He took over as Head of Research at AstraZeneca R&D India in 2000 focusing the unit on discovering novel drugs for the treatment of Tuberculosis. Further as a VP Discovery Research AZ, he handled all the research activities of this R&D unit. In 2011, Dr. Balganesh was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Dr. Balganesh is a member of the OSPF Board of Directors.
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Dr. Bruce Bloom is the Founder of Cures Within Reach. His journey to this position started in February 2002, when he became the Executive Director of Goldman Philanthropic Partnerships, a 501(c)(3) private operating foundation. In 2005, when Goldman Partnerships created the public charity Partnership for Cures to carry on the Goldman mission, Dr. Bloom became President and Chief Science Officer. In October 2012, Partnership for Cures changed its name to Cures Within Reach to better reflect the focus of its mission: repurposing drugs and other treatments to drive more treatments to more patients more quickly. Dr. Bloom directs the operation of this public charity dedicated to improving patient quality and length of life by facilitating pilot clinical trials testing repurposed treatments designed to be immediately incorporated into clinical use.
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Prof. Samir K. Brahmachari is the Academy Professor of the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research, former Professor of Biophysics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the Chief Mentor of Open Source Drug Discovery. He is also the Chief Mentor, Health Technology Innovations for ACCESS Health International, Inc. He was previously the Founder Director of CSIR – Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (1997-2007), the former Director General of CSIR India, the largest publicly funded industrial research organization in the world and Secretary, DSIR, Government of India (2007-2013). He conceptualized and implemented the functional genomics research in India and the Indian Genome Variation Project. He is the chief architect of open source drug discovery project in India. He presently mentors several startups in genomic medicine and big data analytics.
He is the recipient of many national and international awards including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize. He is an elected fellow of The World Academy of Sciences, the European Society of Preventive Medicine and a member of all four National Academies of Science & Engineering, India. |
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Dr. Vijay Chandru (Ph.D., MIT 1982) is an academic entrepreneur recognized as a ‘Technology Pioneer’ by the World Economic Forum in 2006. His academic career in data and decision sciences spanned over two decades at Purdue University and the Indian Institute of Science. He is a co-founder and executive chairman of Strand Life Sciences, India’s leading precision medicine company, since its inception in 2000. He also co-founded PicoPeta Simputers which designed and manufactured India’s first handheld computers. Vijay is the recipient of several awards and honors: Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences (1996), MCIT Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in IT (2001), UGC Hari Om Trust award for “Science and Society” (2003), the President’s Medal of INFORMS in 2006, distinguished Alumni award by the MIT India Program in 2007, and was recognized among the 50 pioneers of change by the India Today magazine in 2008. Vijay was the elected Honorary President (2009-2012) of the Association of Biotech Led Enterprises (ABLE), the apex trade body that represents the Indian biotech industry. He also serves as an advisor to the Karnataka State on Science & Technology and is an (emeritus) Distinguished Technologist of the Indian National Academy of Engineering adjunct at the Indian Institute of Science.
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Wengsi is a graduate of McGill University, Montreal where she completed a BA in International Development and Urban Systems Geography. In 2016, she joined the team at the Open Source Pharma Foundation, assisting with project management, partnership development, communications, and outreach. As a freelance consultant for various individuals, companies, and organizations, her experiences include working one-on-one with a New York Time’s journalist on his podcast about a wrongful conviction; working with a data consulting company on a project seeking to reduce child-mortality in Mali; and illustrating a published children’s book to promote healthy eating. She is a homemade graphic designer who never turns down an opportunity to show off a bit of her creativity, especially to promote a good cause or raise awareness about issues of injustice. Wengsi currently leads the TB Digital Quilt project, a joint project of OSPF and Mayo Clinic Center for Tuberculosis. She is also the owner of a small brick and mortal shop called 6x8 Market in Toronto, Canada.
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Kaveri Das received her PhD from the University of Calcutta in Molecular biology. She did her postdoctoral training at the University of Rochester, New York, USA, working on Rous sarcoma virus. Kaveri joined Astra Research Centre India (later became the AstraZeneca R&D Centre, Bangalore, India) in 1989 and worked on several projects on Japanese encephalitis virus, broad spectrum antibiotics discovery and tuberculosis. She was the Head of Biosciences at the AstraZeneca R&D Centre, Bangalore and led a team of molecular biologists, biochemists and bioinformaticians. Her expertise is primarily in the early part of drug discovery processes for infectious diseases. She was involved with the Government of India’s Open Source Drug Discovery as a consultant starting in 2014. Currently Kaveri is also on the board of the medical device start-up company Biomoneta in Bangalore.
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Keith is a scientist and entrepreneur in the for profit and non profit biomedical space. He was a co-founder and the Executive Director of the i2b2/tranSMART Foundation, a 501c3 non profit open-source, open-data foundation focused on realizing the promise of precision medicine. Keith cofounded the tranSMART Foundation, was its CEO from 2013-2017, and managed its merger with the i2b2 Foundation. Previously he was the VP of Systems Biology at CHDI (a Huntington's disease foundation), where he oversaw a budget of $60M, and implemented a systems biology-based preclinical drug discovery program. Keith spent 12 years in the Pharmaceutical industry with Merck and Bayer, and another 10 years in the Biotech industry as CSO of Gene Logic, and CEO of Viaken and Genstruct/Selventa. he has been the Founder and CEO/Executive Chairman of several new startup companies in the areas of biomedical computing and artificial intelligence (Axiomedix, Ingentium, PSertain Technologies, etc.), and has served as an advisor to numerous venture capital firms, including Atlas Ventures, Oak Investment Partners and Flagship Ventures, as well as leading biotech, healthcare and AI companies.
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Dr. Robert Gallo is the co-founder and director of the Institute of Human Virology (IHV). He is the eminent scientist who became world famous in 1984 when he co-discovered HIV as the cause of AIDS. Little was known then of the mysterious disease that was fast becoming the deadliest in medical history. Though best known for his co-discovery of HIV, Dr. Gallo and his team pioneered the development of the HIV blood test, which enabled health care workers for the first time to screen for the AIDS virus - leading to a more rapid diagnosis while simultaneously protecting patients receiving blood transfusions. In 2011, Dr. Gallo co-founded the Global Virus Network (GVN) to position the world to rapidly respond to new or re-emerging viruses that threaten mankind, to bring together and achieve collaboration amongst the world’s leading virologists, and to support training of the next generation of medical virologists.
Dr. Gallo's research has brought him international recognition as well as election into the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He has been awarded honors for his contribution to science from countries around the world and holds 35 honorary doctorates. Dr. Gallo was the most referenced scientist in the world in the 1980s and 1990s, during which he had the unique distinction of twice winning America's most prestigious scientific award - the Albert Lasker Award in Medicine - in 1982 and again in 1986. Dr. Gallo is the author of more than 1,200 scientific publications and the book "Virus Hunting - AIDS, Cancer & the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery." He is the only scientist to have won two Lasker Awards. Learn more |
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Alina works with Open Source Pharma Foundation (OSPF) supporting multiple projects concentrating on communications, events, and operations. Specialized in cultivating innovative community structures, Alina dedicates herself to initiatives of collaborative creation. A graduate of McGill University in Economic International Development and Management, she realized the importance of novel solutions that incorporate all stakeholders in motivating collective agency and resilience. Appreciating the power of social entrepreneurship, Alina has implicated herself in various start ups and continued to her MSc in Entrepreneurship and Collaborative Innovation at the University of Amsterdam and Vrije University. Since publishing her research of “Makers and Breakers: The Double Edged Sword of Shared Fabrication Spaces and Entrepreneurship” demonstrating how normative and cognitive functions affect maker communities, Alina utilizes the knowledge that collaborative communities are capable of overcoming all kinds of financial, institutional, and economic challenges through an open transparent culture encouraging active participation and meaningful communication. Indeed, she believes that when the space opens for individuals to connect through conversation, anything is possible. Alina is the Co-Founder of Rapids Inc. and co-creator of Alegoria, the board game that sparks conversation through open-ended, surprising, and fun questions. As a firecracker sparking social engagement, Alina is happiest when bringing people together in community to overcome shared obstacles.
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Most recently Nathon helped write the Innovation Agenda for Canada as the Special Innovation Advisor to the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development.
Nathon has worked in two Prime Ministers’ offices, built four companies including a media production company and one of the world’s first upload/edit video websites Bitcast(ers), a social / impact games studio named Social Game Universe and a visual cloud-based authoring tool for apps called Lightning Platform that was deployed around the world for civic engagement projects. Nathon draws on his background as a serial entrepreneur, innovator, founder, funder and artist to be an instigator of creative solutions for unique situations. Nathon has mentored dozens of startups in Silicon Valley with a passion for cross-pollinating people, ideas and cultures. He grew up in Southeast Asia and has worked across the globe, including the Middle East, Europe and Central America. He continues to work in media, technology, and policy in the pursuit of positive social progress with the most inspiring people and organizations in the world. |
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Dr. M. V. Hosur obtained M.Sc degree in Physics from Karnataka University, Dharwad and Ph. D. degree from the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. For his Ph. D. thesis in the field of X-ray Crystallography of biological molecules he was awarded Martin Forster Gold Medal by Indian Institute of Science. After retirement from BARC, Mumbai, as Head, Protein Crystallography Section, he is presently adjunct professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. As a post-doctoral fellow at University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA and Purdue University, USA, he has resolved to atomic detail structures of viruses, which are huge protein assemblies with molecular weights in the mega Dalton region. He has used crystallography to gain insight into mechanisms of enzyme-catalysis and drug-resistance in relation to HIV-AIDS. His current research interests are in the fields of structural biology and genomics related to chikungunya, epilepsy and other neurological disorders. Dr. Hosur has been Visiting Scientist, National Cancer Institute, Frederick, Maryland, USA, and Wenner-Grenn Fellow, Lund University, Sweden. Dr. Hosur was invited by the Swedish council for Nobel Prize in Chemistry to recommend names for the award of Nobel Prize, for the years 2006 – 2010. Dr. Hosur MV has co-chaired sessions in the IUCr conference organized by the International Union of Crystallography in Madrid, Spain. Dr. Hosur is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi. Dr. Hosur is a member of following INSA committees: 1) committee to screen election of new Fellows, 2) committee for the selection of INSA Young Scientists Award, and 3) Awards committee for the year 2019. He is also a member of the expert committee on synchrotron usage, set up by DBT, Government of India and the big-data analytics committee set up by Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India, New Delhi.
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Dr. UCA Jaleel is a Principal Scientist at the OSPF-NIAS Drug Discovery Lab, NIAS IISc Campus Bangalore. He leads a team of drug discovery researchers who focus on various aspects of cheminformatics, including machine learning and AI-based analysis of neglected tropical diseases like TB, Malaria, and Leishmaniasis. His primary focus is in the application of machine learning and AI models in the medicinal chemistry data sets. He successfully applied ANN based machine learning models on the inconclusive molecules of the beta-lactamase bioassays of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. As a Principal Investigator of the "Cheminformatics for Neglected Diseases Project" for Open Source Drug Discovery CSIR Govt of India, he was instrumental in building as well as managing the crowdsource and machine learning solutions for various issues in the tropical disease research. His major contribution includes the solutions for the issues related with higher dimensional analysis and extractions of principal features of the in silico designing of machine learning models. His work at CSIR OSDD research unit at Indian Institute of science Bangalore could establish the successful modelling of semiconducting properties by machine learning and higher dimensional correlations of various kinds of datasets.
As a big believer of open source, Jaleel supports the crowd and cloud source way of conducting research for early-stage drug discovery. Before joining OSPF in 2015, Jaleel worked for 12 years for a diverse range of organizations, including the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) research unit at IISc, Bangalore; and the UGC Centre for Cheminformatics, Malabar Christian College in Calicut, India. In this role, he was responsible for guiding and supervising researchers in cheminformatics. |
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Dr. MS Jawahar, a physician and epidemiologist, graduated from the University of Madras in South India with undergraduate (MBBS) and post graduate (MD) medical degrees before joining the ICMR-National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT) of the Indian Council of Medical Research. During his tenure at the NIRT, he acquired a Masters Degree (MSc) and Diploma (DLSHTM) in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, on a WHO fellowship. His research experience spanning over 33 years at the NIRT covered the spectrum of clinical and epidemiological research in tuberculosis and HIV. His area of expertise was in randomised clinical trials with the main focus on shortening treatment duration for tuberculosis. He served as Principal Investigator for six randomised clinical trials in pulmonary and lymphnode tuberculosis. He also served as Principal Investigator for the Indian site for a WHO/TDR/ World Bank funded multinational study on gender differentials in TB control. He has published over 50 papers in peer reviewed journals and has participated in more than 150 conferences and seminars, often in an invited capacity.
Dr. Jawahar was actively associated with the Revised National TB Control Programme of India and was part of teams that developed guidelines and frameworks for the programme. He is a member of the faculty for post graduate teaching programmes in epidemiology and public health of the ICMR-National Institute of Epidemiology, Chennai and the Christian Medical College, Vellore. He helped to design, guide and execute an online teaching programme ‘Manage TB’ for doctors for the NIRT in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology. He serves as Chairman/ Member in Ethics Committees of several hospitals and research centres. Currently Dr. Jawahar serves as a Consultant at the NIRT. |
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Kerry Kennedy is president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. Under her leadership, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights partners with the bravest people on earth to create lasting change. She is the proud mother of three daughters, Cara, Mariah, and Michaela. A human rights activist and lawyer, she authored New York Times best seller Being Catholic Now, as well as Speak Truth to Power and Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope.
The seventh of Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy’s eleven children, Kerry Kennedy has devoted more than 40 years to the pursuit of equal justice, the promotion and protection of basic rights, and the preservation of the rule of law. She works on a range of issues, including child labor, women’s rights, disappearances, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, criminal justice reform, immigration, impunity, and environmental justice. She has led hundreds of human rights delegations in support of these causes. She appears regularly as a commentator on national and worldwide television networks, and is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines. Learn more |
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Peter studied Biochemistry and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Vienna and Karolinska Institute. He did his Ph.D. in Computational Biochemistry with Amedeo Caflisch at the University of Zurich. After a short continuation as a postdoc in the same group, Peter joined the lab of Brian K. Shoichet at the University of California, San Francisco. This coincided with the publication of the structure of the first pharmacologically relevant G protein-coupled receptor, a unique opportunity to carry out one of the first studies of xray-structure-based ligand design for this protein class. From April 2011 until October 2016, he was an Emmy Noether Junior Group Leader at Philipps-University Marburg. Between May 2013 and April 2017, Peter was chairing COST Action CM1207 "GLISTEN: GPCR-Ligand Interactions, Structures, and Transmembrane Signalling: a European Research Network", which connected more than 210 scientists from 31 European countries.
Since October 2016, Peter is Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, funded by the Heisenberg programme of the German Research Foundation DFG. His research interests focus on computational approaches to drug design, particularly tailoring properties of candidate drugs at an early stage. |
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Anil Koul, Ph.D. Vice President and Head, Global Public Health and Infectious Disease Drug Discovery, Johnson & Johnson; helped discover MDR TB drug bedaquiline. Ex-Director of CSIR-IMTECH, India’s premier biotech laboratory. Functioned at rank of Additional Secretary to Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India.
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Bhimsen Kulkarni is an outstanding professional with 18 years of experience in HR Management, General Administration/ Facility Management as well as 21 years in the Indian Air Force. His last association was with Alkem Laboratories Ltd. as the Manager of General Administration. Prior to that, he was associated with AstraZeneca India Pvt Ltd for 16 years in various capacities. Kulkarni is a meticulous planner and implementer with proven abilities in streamlining operational processes. He is skilled in interfacing with clients to understand their requirements and provide services accordingly.
Kulkarni also expertise in handling HR functions entailing recruitment, training, succession planning, employee retention planning, employee satisfaction survey, and performance management. He is a competent administrator with proven resourcefulness and adeptness in administrative functions. While he is an effective communicator and team leader with strong analytical, problem solving as well as organizational abilities, he possesses a flexible detail oriented attitude. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Osmania University and Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration and Personal Management and Industrial Relations from Bangalore University and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan respectively. |
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Ariel is a research director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), co-founder and vice-director of the Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI; www.cri-paris.org) and co-director of its AIV M.Sc. program. He graduated from the ‘Amirim’ interdisciplinary program with a major in Chemistry (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and received my M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science for work on enzyme models, antibody conformational changes and directed evolution. After a research period on protein structures at the Scripps Institute (California, USA), and postdoctoral work in Paris on bacterial genetics, he integrated in the Evolutionary Systems Biology team (now: SEED: Systems Engineering and Evolution Dynamics) at INSERM.
His research interests revolve around applying Physical, Chemical and Systems/Synthetic Biological approaches to study variability between clonal individuals. Major contributions in past 5 years include publications in Nature, Science, Cell and PNAS journals for which he is an occasional reviewer. He coordinates the Citizen CyberLab European project (citizencyberlab.eu), a national research agency interdisciplinary consortium and takes part in the Axa foundation Chair on Longevity. He is also involved in research at the interface between art & science. |
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Amanda is an advisor, board member, writer and college lecturer on technology, marketing and open source issues. Most recently she was the Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Developer Programs for the Linux Foundation, a worldwide non-profit that advances and protects the Linux operating system and other open source software projects. As a founding executive of the Linux Foundation, she led growth of the business to a $50m a year entity and established the brand as one of the most trusted names in software.
For twenty years, she has occupied a unique position in the technology world—the intersection of open source software and marketing. She has incubated and designed open source governance for many projects, and created and curated software conferences including LinuxCon, ContainerCon and CloudOpen. Currently, she is an advisor on marketing and creative strategy, open source governance and organizational development. Amanda is also a published fiction writer, with an MFA in creative writing, and currently lives in Salt Lake City, UT. |
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His name means child of victory. He specializes in the impossible. He seeks to help creatively realize human rights for billions. He is an international human rights lawyer and social entrepreneur. Newsweek named him as one of “America’s 50 Greatest Disruptors: Visionaries Who Are Changing the World.” He received the William Rogers Award, the Brown Alumni Association’s highest honor, given to one graduate per year. He was chosen for the world's Worthy 100.
Jaykumar has freed a man from death row. As the fifteenth lawyer to take up the case, he helped free another man serving life, by hunting through the toughest prisons of New York for the real killer. He represented the student leaders of Tiananmen Square against the former Premier of China, and helped win longshot victories on behalf of victims of the Bosnian genocide, environmental activists from Nigeria, and non-violent protestors in New York. In public health, he has helped reduce the world’s most widespread form of malnutrition at scale, by taking salt “double fortified” with iron and iodine to tens of millions of people and billions of meals. And he and colleagues seek to create a world of medicine for all, via an open source paradigm for pharma. His work has been profiled in The New Yorker, Fast Company, New York magazine, The New York Times, and The Times of India. Jaykumar has held academic positions at Harvard and McGill, and been selected as a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a JD and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia, and completed a BA and one year of medical school at Brown. LinkedIn | Email |
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Bernard Munos is known as one of the most influential people in biopharma today. He is a Senior Fellow at FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute, and the founder of the InnoThink Center for Research in Biomedical Innovation, a consultancy that helps biomedical research organizations become better innovators. Before that, he served as an advisor for corporate strategy at Eli Lilly, where he focused on disruptive innovation and the radical redesign of R&D. Several of Munos’ research papers — published in Nature and Science — have helped stimulate a broad rethinking of the pharmaceutical business model by industry, investors, policymakers, regulators and patient advocates. His work has been profiled by Forbes magazine, and the popular industry publication FiercePharma has named him one of the 25 most influential people in biopharma. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine’s Drug Forum; a member of the Advisory Board of Science Translational Medicine; a non-executive Director of Glenmark Pharmaceuticals; a Board member or Advisor to a dozen other companies or publicly-financed research organizations; and a former member of the Advisory Council of the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Translational Sciences (NCATS). He received his MBA from Stanford University, and holds other graduate degrees in animal science and agricultural economics from the Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences and the University of California, Davis. He blogs about biomedical innovation on the Forbes website.
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Allison Randal is a software developer and open source strategist. She is a board member of the OpenStack Foundation, board member of the Perl Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders.
Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa, but her love of coding led her away from natural languages to computer languages. In over 30 years as a programmer, she has developed everything from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, mobile apps, and shipping fulfillment systems, to compilers, hypervisors, database replication, deployment automation, and talking smart-home appliances, worked as a language designer, engineering manager, CTO, conference organizer, and editor, written three books, and founded a tech publishing company. At various points in the past she served as chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, president of the Open Source Initiative, president of the Perl Foundation, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly, conference chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu and Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian and OpenStack projects, and is currently working on a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. |
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Nibedita Rath is Scientific Director of the Open Source Pharma Foundation. She has more than eighteen years of scientific research experience both in industry and academia including IVY League, Premier Indian Institute, Biotech, Government undertaking and in non-profit organizations. She has experience in the interface of chemistry and biology, and she has played a key role in evaluating projects that includes strategy, synthesis, screening, structure-activity relationship (SAR) analyses, medicinal chemistry design. She has worked in multidisciplinary drug discovery projects in therapeutic areas like metabolic disorder, oncogenes and infection. As a Functional Head in a biotech company, she was instrumental in building as well as managing the Chemical Synthesis Lab and Biochemical Screening division. Her major contribution includes taking nutraceuticals from bench to market as a food supplement and playing a key role in establishing a virtual Hepatotoxicity model for a client. Her work as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in MCRC, UPENN focused on identification of transcription factors in the formation and differentiation of the mammalian lung and vascular system. Her work at Drexel focused on molecular and functional dissection of BRCA1 and ELK1 Tumor Suppressor Genes in breast, ovarian and prostate cancers. Her work at the Indian Institute of Science focused on complexation behavior of Ru(II) with nitrogen-based biheterocycles and phosphine derived ligands and analyses of their X-ray crystal structures and also studied their catalytic properties. She obtained her PhD in Chemistry from Utkal University, Orissa in 1999. She is a Gold Medalist and conferred with Best Graduate in the year 1992 and holds all India rank in GATE-1994.
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Dr. Shandil, Director, FNDR, served AstraZeneca India, Bangalore, for 20 years in various scientific and managerial roles at Infection – innovative medicines group. Shandil was Head of DMPK & Animal Sciences and led multidisciplinary teams in biology, immunology and pharmacology. He played a central role in building microbiology, cell biology and Pharmacology based drug discovery platforms relevant to drug discovery in infectious diseases.
He was instrumental in building and managing state of the art bio-safety laboratories, a Vivarium, and validating animal models of tuberculosis, malaria and serious bacterial infections, PKPD and Pharmacology at AstraZeneca Bangalore. Shandil’s scientific leadership led to discovery and pre-clinical development of AZD 5847, an oxazolidinone class of compound that has recently completed Phase 2a/EBA clinical trial in TB patients. He led pharmacology of several TB and malaria lead optimization (LO) programs. His most recent & significant contribution includes discovery of Azaindoles, a yet-another clinical candidate for TB [Shirude. P et.al. Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, 2014, 58:5325-31]. He holds/shares patents for discovery of AZD 5847 and Azaindole class of compounds for the treatment of tuberculosis. He has ~30 publications in peer reviewed national and international journals, a dozen of them in very prestigious drug discovery journals like Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Tuberculosis and Science. Shandil is scientific consultant and advisor to biotech companies and Research Institutions and holds Adjunct faculty position at Transdisciplinary University, Bangalore. LinkedIn | Email |
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Mat Todd was born in Manchester, England. He obtained his PhD in organic chemistry from Cambridge University in 1999, was a Wellcome Trust postdoc at The University of California, Berkeley, a college fellow back at Cambridge University, a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London and between 2005 and 2018 was at the School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney. He is now Chair of Drug Discovery at University College London. He lives in Greenwich, London, with his wife and two children.
Mat’s research interests include the development of new ways to make molecules, particularly how to make chiral molecules with new catalysts. He is also interested in making metal complexes that do unusual things when they meet biological molecules or metal ions. His lab motto is «To make the right molecule in the right place at the right time», and his students are currently trying to work out what this means. He has a significant interest in open science, and how it may be used to accelerate research, with particular emphasis on open source discovery of new medicines. He founded and currently leads the Open Source Malaria (OSM) and Open Source Mycetoma (MycetOS) consortia, and is a founder of a broader Open Source Pharma movement. He is on the Editorial Boards of PLoS One, ChemistryOpen and Nature Scientific Reports. |
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Andrew Updegrove is a co-founder and partner of the Boston law firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP. Since 1988 he has worked with over 180 consortia, accredited standards development organizations and open source foundations, most of which he helped form. He has testified before the United States Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission and Congressional and state committees regarding consortia and standard setting, and has filed pro bono “friend of the court” briefs with the Federal Circuit Court, Supreme Court, and Federal Trade Commission on leading standards litigation. In 2002, he launched ConsortiumInfo.org, the most extensive resource on the Internet dedicated to consortia and standard setting. In 2004 he was asked to join the United States Standards Strategy revision committee, received the President’s Award for Journalism from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 2005, and has served as a member of the Boards of Directors of ANSI, the Free Standards Group, the Linux Foundation and WorkCred, as well as on the advisory boards of numerous open collaboration groups. He is a graduate of Yale University and the Cornell University Law School.
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John Wilbanks is the chief commons officer at Sage Bionetworks and a data commons expert and advocate. He has spent his career working to advance open content, open data and open innovation systems. Wilbanks also serves as a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and as a senior advisor for big data to the National Coordination Office. Previously, Wilbanks worked as a legislative aide to Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark, served as the first assistant director at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, founded and led to acquisition the bioinformatics company Incellico, Inc., and was vice president of science at Creative Commons. In February 2013, in response to a We the People petition that was spearheaded by Wilbanks and signed by 65,000 people, the U.S. government announced a plan to open up taxpayer-funded research data and make it available for free. Wilbanks received a B.A. in philosophy from Tulane University.
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Accounting Firm:
Suresh Nandini Associates, Chartered Accountants (Bangalore)
Company Secretarial Firm:
Shreeji Advisory Services Private Limited (Mumbai)
Legal Counsel:
Luthra & Luthra LLP (Delhi and Bangalore)
Suresh Nandini Associates, Chartered Accountants (Bangalore)
Company Secretarial Firm:
Shreeji Advisory Services Private Limited (Mumbai)
Legal Counsel:
Luthra & Luthra LLP (Delhi and Bangalore)
