Dr. Dhananjay Bakhle

Dr. Dhananjay Bakhle is a clinical pharmacologist and clinical-research leader whose career spans four decades of pharmaceutical development in India and globally. A four-decade veteran of pharmaceutical development, he completed his MD from Grant Medical College, Mumbai, in 1985 and specialized in clinical pharmacology and clinical research when the discipline was still in its infancy in India – conducting some of the country’s earliest Phase I studies.

He built an in-house clinical pharmacology unit at Glaxo, was appointed Vice President – Medical at Schering-Plough (Fulford) at the age of 33 – where he led the approval and launch of India’s first two biotech anti-cancer products – and served as Director of Medical Services at Lupin, representing India on the WHO committee on tuberculosis. He helped establish Novartis’s global development unit in Mumbai, created a clinical research and global medical-writing group at Aventis (whose clinical and regulatory work received successive global awards from the President of Sanofi in 2006 and 2007), headed Reliance Clinical Research Services, and later led all medical and clinical activities at Lupin Research Park, Pune, serving on the board of Lupin’s Japanese joint venture YL Biologics.