Dr. Saji George has over 35 years of industry experience in the pharmaceutical and biotech business, both R&D and Business Development. His expertise and knowledge in drug discovery starting from screening, lead/hit identification, optimization, validation, pre-clinical assays, clinical studies and commercial manufacturing of fermentation based molecules has led to many innovations. Dr George is an outstanding program management professional with extensive experience in product development, project management, regulatory-submission, outsourcing, compliance and quality assurance

Among Dr George’s remarkable achievements while at Piramal Life Sciences in Mumbai include techno-commercial leadership of technology imbibing for beta lactam antibiotics and commercial manufacturing of anti-infective molecules starting from technology development, infrastructure development and commissioning. He also led teams for hit identification, hit to lead optimization, high through put screening from microbial libraries for NCE discovery of various therapeutic molecules, prominent among them being Echinocandin, Flavopyridol, and Forskolin. In addition Dr George led a microbial extract library generation for lead molecule identification. This resulted in two NCEs from Korcurea, a marine organism, one an anti-cancer and the other an anti-infective. Dr George was also responsible for clinical material generation for trial studies by fermentation. While at Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Hyderabad, India, Dr. George has also been instrumental in business development for fermentation based generics. His success includes bigeneric development of the molecules Sirolimus, Everolimus and Liraglutide

Dr. Saji George has also been closely involved in entrepreneurship development. He was instrumental in managing and leading a Biotechnology Park at Kochi, India – a joint venture of the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology; RGCB (Department of Biotechnology, Government of India and the Government of Kerala). Here he hand-held over 30 start-up companies, catalysing them in accelerating to stand alone independent units, manufacturing various biotechnology products. At RGCB, he also used his expertise in the IPR development & transfer of technology of Uttroside B, a plant derived molecule discovered at the institute and a herbal oral wash for radiation induced mucositis in oral cancer patients treated with radiotherapy.