Anand Anandkumar Ph.D is co-founder and CEO of Bugworks, an Indo/USA/AUS startup working on a novel class of broad spectrum antibiotics to tackle the hardest drug-resistant bacterial pathogens. The company’s lead asset BWC0977 (IV) is in mid stages of Phase 1 First-in-Human studies in Australia.

More recently the company has also forayed into oncology, by designing small molecules to tackle hard to treat solid cell tumors. Bugworks has won many national and international innovation awards including the Best Biotech Startup in India 2015 and the Economic Times Top Innovator award 2017, and is the first company from Asia to win the coveted CARB-X grant. Most recently, Bugworks announced its collaborative partnership with GARDP, where the latter will be supporting the clinical development of BWC0977(IV).

Anand was previously co-founder and Managing Director at Cellworks, a company that is a pioneer in the personalized cancer therapy area using modelling/simulation platforms. Before this, Anand worked within the semiconductor industry, with work experience spanning USA/UK/Japan/China and India.

Amongst other industry affiliations, Anand is a former board member of the AMR Industry Alliance and advisor to the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), CARBX’s India incubator. He is also a member of GARDP’s India advisory board. Anand is an avid philanthropist and founding trustee of CHILD, an NGO in India that takes care of young children orphaned by HIV/AIDS. He is also a co-founder of Humanist India, a foundation that supports cancer treatment for those below the poverty line.

Anand received his masters and doctorate degrees in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering from George Washington University, USA.