Ajay Mandal,PhD
Managing Director and VP,
Medicinal Chemistry and Discovery Sciences
Ajay has over 24 years’ experience in the Pharma, CROs and Pharmatech sector as medicinal chemistry and executive manager. He pursued graduate studies under Professor Ian Fleming FRS at Cambridge University and received Ph.D. degree in Organic Synthesis in 1999. Following postdoctoral studies under Professor Donald Hilvert at ETH Zurich, he joined Takeda Pharmaceutical in 2003.
He worked for various medicinal chemistry programmes such as GnRH, Sila-venlafaxine, GPR54, TRPM8 opener and blocker. In 2010, he moved to Evotec Ltd in Oxford UK, working with a large medicinal chemistry projects with biotech, big pharma and virtual company.
In 2017, he joined Concept Life Sciences in Sandwich, UK as a Research Leader – Medicinal Chemistry and Early Discovery Chemistry, leading a team of >50 scientists.
In 2020, he joined IRL in Hyderabad, India as a Vice President of Discovery Sciences, leading a team of >100 scientists. In 2021, he founded Symbol Discovery Ltd, Hyderabad India and Cambridge UK.
Specialities: Drug discovery and early development in small molecules. Strong track record of delivery from exploratory phase to clinic. Expert knowledge of structure-based drug design (SBDD).