Dr. T.s.balganesh

Biography

 Dr. Balganesh has three decades of experience in the area of antibacterial drug discovery. As the Head of Research at AstraZeneca (AZ), Bangalore India, he led the unit to deliver AZ’s first anti-tuberculosis molecule for clinical development. Immediately before taking up his assignment at Gangagen, he was mentoring drug discovery programmes in different Indian National Laboratories under Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India in the capacity of “Distinguished Scientist”. Dr. Balganesh is trained as a Medical Microbiologist. His doctorate work was on ‘Drug resistance in Vibrio cholerae’ at University of Calcutta. He gained his post-doctoral experience at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, USA, and Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany. His research experience is mainly in the area of infectious diseases. He led the ‘Diarrhoeal Diseases’ and ‘Broad-Spectrum anti-bacterial project’ teams at AstraZeneca, Bangalore. He then went on to lead the anti-tuberculosis programme at AstraZeneca, which delivered the compound currently in Phase 2 of clinical development. The group at AZ, Bangalore that Dr. Balganesh led was globally acknowledged as one of the leading groups in this area and had several collaborative programmes with organisations like the Global Alliance for TB and was a partner in global consortia like the EU FW6/7 programme towards finding new medicines for the treatment of tuberculosis. He was also responsible for initiating the anti-malarial drug discovery programme at AZ, India, which was a highly successful project that worked closely with Medicines for Malaria Venture. He has ~ 30 publications and ~10 patents to his credit. Dr. Balganesh was awarded Honorary Doctorate from University of Uppsala in recognition of his work in tuberculosis and malaria. He is on the review panel of drug discovery programmes like ‘Innovative Medicines Initiative’; a European Union (EU) programme to find novel treatments for Gram-negative bacterial pathogens. He continues to guide research programmes in several National Laboratories in India.

Research Interest

 Microbiology, molecular Biology, Clinical studies