Pankaj Agarwal

Pankaj Agarwal has 22+ years of strategic and tactical experience utilizing bioinformatics to enable drug discovery and create pipeline value. He specializes in mastering the high-level drug discovery questions for an enterprise and identifying efficient bioinformatics solutions resulting in maximal value creation. He collaborated extensively with numerous pharmaceutical project teams, academic/biotech partners, and top informatics talent. Dr. Agarwal has 50+ publications in top journals and multiple methodological and gene patents. Dr. Agarwal also served on NSF, NIH, FDA and PhRMA panels. He possesses a B.Tech. in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT, Delhi and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU. He is a founding director and senior member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). GSK Pharmaceuticals R&D appointed him a Senior Fellow in recognition of his internal and external achievements during his 22+ year tenure. At GSK, he was responsible for target selection and validation by developing a multitude of technologies ranging from gene discovery from ESTs and genomic sequence in the early days to genetics-based target discovery more recently. He invented and patented methods for gene set enrichment and published the earliest network analysis on human protein interactions and comprehensive mining of GEO data. He also led an internal biotech to computationally repurpose the entire clinical portfolio and experimentally validate it using in vitro, in vivo and ex vivo experiments. This included hypotheses on rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, asthma, COPD, neurosciences (ALS & MS), NASH, rare diseases, and cancer. At BioInfi, Dr. Agarwal serves as an advisor and strategic consultant to disease foundations and biotechnology companies. Most importantly, Pankaj is passionate about drug discovery, rare diseases, and helping patients.