Senior Management

 

Science

Ravi Ganapathy, Ph.D, PGDBA (Ops)

Head of Vaccine Process Development

ravi.ganapathy@ivi.int

Ravi Ganapathy has more than 25 years of professional work experience in the hospital, biotech research & vaccine industry. He has hands-on experience in development, manufacturing and testing of recombinant (bacterial/yeast-derived), bacterial and viral vaccines. Having led R&D, Production and Quality Assurance teams he has an extensive understanding of manufacturing and R&D-related quality & regulatory requirements for commercialization of biotech products, especially vaccines, and the related GLP & GMP documentation. He joined IVI as the Head of Vaccine Process Development in May 2019.

Immediately prior to joining IVI he was with Biological E. Ltd., Hyderabad, India for over 5 years. While there he helped set-up laboratories, built and led the Manufacturing Sciences team providing full-fledged support to the commercial manufacturing divisions (production & QC) -including Life-Cycle Management involving the introduction of new delivery systems, and technology transfers. Based on the work done under his leadership at BE, two international patents have been filed; one involving a novel adjuvant preparation process (published), and the other pertaining to an alcohol-free polysaccharide purification process (currently under review).

Before joining BE, Dr. Ganapathy spent 2 years at Shantha Biotechnics (a Sanofi company), where he led the scale-up of the manufacturing process of a tetravalent rotavirus vaccine from Phase-I to Phase-III and oversaw the Ph-III material production and delivery. His first vaccine industry experience, however, was with Bharat Biotech International Ltd., where he worked for 14 years, and also completed his PhD through his work on a CDC-NIH-sourced multi-epitope, recombinant malarial vaccine candidate against Plasmodium falciparum. At BBIL Dr. Ganapathy spearheaded teams on projects for manufacturing vaccines for use in several clinical trials (supported by PATH/BMGF, MVI/EVI and DBT-India) and for commercial supplies. He also played a crucial role in product and process development, and in the approval of the first cell culture-derived Pandemic H1N1 Influenza vaccine in India (2009).

Dr. Ganapathy graduated as a double-gold medalist for his post-grad work in `Medical Entomology’ from VCRC (ICMR) in 1993. Prior to that, he obtained his bachelor’s degree in `Medical Laboratory Technology’ from JIPMER (1991). He has been a lead- or co-author of 8 research papers and has delivered talks at several international conferences.