BIO India Keynote and Plenary Luncheon

Rashmi Barbhaiya, PhD
CEO & Managing Director, Advinus Therapeutics

Rashmi H. Barbhaiya, PhD is a Pharmaceutical Executive with 30 years of experience in Pharmaceutical R&D. He has a unique blend of management experience in Drug Discovery, Development and Life Cycle Management. He is one of the founders, CEO and Managing Director of Advinus Therapeutics, a research-based pharma company located in Bangalore and Pune, India.

Dr. Barbhaiya started his industrial pharmaceutical career in 1980 with Bristol-Myers Company in United States where he spent the next 21 years. The diversity of his background and experience has played a key role in speedy and successful development of a number of drugs for the treatment of a variety of diseases such as, AIDS and other infectious diseases, cancer, depression, anxiety, hypertension, CHF, diabetes and mild to moderate pain, including migraine.

In the year 2002, he returned to India to join Ranbaxy as the President of R & D and led a team of over 900 professionals involved in drug delivery and innovation-driven new drug research and development activities as well as R&D for developing generic drugs. He is credited for attracting world-class experienced scientists from overseas and for enhancing an innovation-driven culture to create one of the leading pharmaceutical R & D organizations in India. He was instrumental in creating an R & D alliance between Ranbaxy and GSK, the first of its kind for an Indian company. He is also credited for creating an alliance between Medicine for Malaria Venture (MMV) and Ranbaxy.

In the year 2006, he co-founded Advinus Therapeutics Pvt Ltd. This was his first entrepreneurial venture. Advinus has a unique business model – one of the business units of Advinus focuses on drug discovery while the other one is revenue generating service organization focusing on pre- and early-clinical development. Advinus is created to address fundamental issues of R& D productivity and cost – a center for frugal innovation. Under his leadership, Advinus has already established an impressive record of novel R &D alliances with large pharma, R&D productivity and cost-effective R&D.

He obtained a PhD degree in Clinical Pharmacology from the St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, University of London. He continued his education through post-doctoral training at the University of Florida and University of Wisconsin. His scientific contributions have resulted in over 150 publications. He has served on the Editorial Boards of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy as well as Biopharmaceutics and Drug Disposition journals. Dr. Barbhaiya has received a number of awards for his scientific contributions. Some of these include AAPS Fellow, AAPS Meritorious Manuscript Award, AAiPS Outstanding Achievement Award, Ranbaxy Award for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research, India Life Sciences Person of the Year 2007 by Burrill & Company and BioSpectrum Entrepreneur of the Year 2010.

Achin Gupta
Director, Strategic Planning, Abbott Laboratories

Achin Gupta works for Global Strategy team at Abbott’s Established Products Division (EPD) as Director – Strategic Planning, based in Mumbai, India. He is part of the group working on refining the long term strategy for EPD, in line with the dramatic pace of change in the operating environment in pharmaceuticals and healthcare industry.

Prior to joining Abbott, Achin was with Glenmark Pharmaceuticals for nearly eight years, last four as the Head of Corporate Strategy. He led the company’s M&A and licensing strategy and was responsible for Project management and portfolio planning of R&D assets. As part of this role, he has been actively involved in driving several research based collaborations around acquisition of biotech products, licensing-in technologies, manufacturing collaborations as well as out-licensing of NCE/ NBE assets. Prior to joining Glenmark, he worked for nearly five years with management consulting firm, A.T. Kearney, based out of New Delhi office.

Achin holds an MTech in Biochemical Engineering & Biotechnology from IIT Delhi and an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad in India. 

Phil Kearney, PhD, MBA
Director, External Scientific Affairs, Worldwide Licensing, Merck

Dr. Phil Kearney joined Merck in 2007 as the key scout for innovative research and development in Australia, New Zealand and some parts of South East Asia. The Sydney-born scientist has the challenge of uncovering and commercialising discoveries by local researchers that have strong potential to benefit the health of people around the globe. Prior to joining Merck, Dr. Kearney spent 7 years in small to medium biotech companies in Scandinavia. He held project and executive management positions in Active Biotech Research (Sweden) and Santaris Pharma (Denmark) during this time. Before leaving Australia he had been the head of the Research Laboratory in one of Australia’s leading Haematology Departments, at St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney for over 10 years. The theme of the laboratory was antisense and ribozyme mediated ablation of bcr-abl expression in Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia. As an adjunct position Dr. Kearney also ran the Molecular Medicine Diagnostic Laboratory for the hospital pathology service, SydPath. He holds a PhD from Monash University, which was followed by post-doctoral training at the Murdoch Institute in Melbourne and University College London. He also holds a MBA from the University of Sydney.

Chaitanya Saxena, PhD
Chief Executive Officer, Shantani Proteome Analytics Pvt. Ltd.

With 10+ years of experience in utilizing biophysical techniques to solve relevant problems in life sciences, Dr. Saxena is a seasoned professional. While working at Eli Lilly & Company, he successfully developed numerous novel technologies for drug-target deconvolution and drug-target interaction measurements in in-tact biological systems. Before that, he finished his PhD in Biophysics from the Dept. of Physics at Ohio State University. He also served as Board Director for Kshitiz Inc. from 2004-2007. Presently, he is shaping Shantani Proteome Analytics Pvt. Ltd., a wet-lab technology based start-up at Venture Centre, National Chemical Laboratory Innovation Park in Pune, India, that develops and provides drug target deconvolution technologies to drug discovery organizations and utilizes its technology for in-house drug discovery efforts.

Renu Swarup, PhD

Adviser, Department of Biotechnology Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India; Managing Director, Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, A Government of India Enterprise

Dr. Renu Swarup is a Managing Director of Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), a Public Sector Company incorporated by the Government of India to nurture and promote innovation research in the Biotech Enterprise with special focus on Start-ups and SMEs. She was responsible for getting the new organisation created and getting it operational. BIRAC successfully runs a large number of funding schemes for Industry Innovation, ranging from the Ignition Grant to Proof of Concept funding, validation and product development. The main focus of the organisation is on enabling and supporting the Biotech Innovation Ecosystem.

Dr. Swarup has also been closely involved in programmes and activities related to Women and Science. She was responsible for implementing the DBT Scheme on Biotechnology Career Advancement for Women Scientists - BioCARe. She was also a member of the Task Force on Women in Science constituted by the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister.

Holly Vineyard
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration

Holly Vineyard serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Africa, the Middle East and South Asia in the International Trade Administration's Market Access and Compliance unit. In this position, she directs the Department's regional activities on market access, trade, commerce and compliance with international trade agreements. She is responsible for developing programs, policies and strategies to strengthen the U.S. commercial position in nearly 80 countries.

Ms. Vineyard serves as a co-chair for the U.S. - India High Technology Cooperation Group’s working group on Biotechnology and Life Sciences (which includes biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and health IT). Ms. Vineyard joined the Commerce Department in 1994.

Prior to her current position, Ms. Vineyard served as the Director of the Office of Africa, as Senior Policy Advisor to the Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, and as a desk officer in the Office of South Asia and Oceania. She has been detailed twice to the Senate Finance Committee, where she worked with the Trade Subcommittee on a wide range of issues, including its consideration of the African Growth and Opportunity Act. Prior to joining the Commerce Department, Ms. Vineyard worked in the private sector.

She holds a master's degree from George Mason University and a bachelor's degree from the College of William and Mary.