Vasan Sambandamurthy is the Senior Vice President of Strategy & Global Operations at Bugworks Research Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing a novel class of broad-spectrum antibacterial agents and immunotherapies to treat patients with critical care needs in infection and cancer.
He has over 20 years of professional experience in vaccine discovery and drug development at major global corporations like Novartis, AstraZeneca, and Biocon. At these organizations, he has held senior leadership positions, provided strategic directions, and orchestrated major business operations to develop affordable medicines across multiple therapeutic areas, including oncology, diabetes, infectious diseases and inflammation.
Most recently, Vasan was the Chief Executive Officer at the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, a major global funding agency promoting basic, biomedical and clinical research across India. Currently, he serves as a Board member of the AMR Industry Alliance and a Board member of ABLE, a not-for-profit pan-India forum that represents the Indian biotech sector.
Vasan is a recipient of several awards, including the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) fellowship to pursue research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. He has over 50 publications in peer-reviewed international journals, including Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology, Nature Communications and is a co-inventor on four patents