Pfizer senior director joins Advinus

Rajiv Shukla, senior director (business development) of Pfizer Inc, has joined Advinus Therapeutics as vice-president and head of business development and marketing. He will be responsible for leading the business development, project management and marketing of Advinus globally.

Advinus Therapeutics is a joint venture between the Tata group and the former Ranbaxy R&D chief Rashmi Barbhaiya.

Rajiv, during his tenure at Pfizer, played a leadership role in five acquisitions totalling more than $63 billion and led outsourcing strategy for global R&D focused on India and China for the multinational pharma giant.

He had also served on multiple leadership teams and global business initiatives aimed at transforming Pfizer's R&D goals and capabilities.

Before Pfizer, Rajiv was a senior strategy consultant at Boston Consulting Group. Prior to BCG, he had also worked in venture capital, at a renowned Cancer hospital in Boston and the Harvard Centre for Risk Analysis.

Advinus is the first exclusive drug discovery company in India. Since the company has major plans to explore the global market for pharmaceutical discovery utilising the country's talent pool, is is all set to create one of the world's best research facilities and business development team with the best available talent pool from across the world.

It had recently appointed Nimish Vachhrajani, a former fellow and senior scientist in the Bristol-Myers Squibb's research team in Princeton, as vice-president of pharmaceutical and agrochemicals development.

Vachharajani, who brings over 13 years of drug development experience from a large pharmaceutical company in the US and with a record of publishing over 40 scientific and review articles in various peer-reviewed journals, will be responsible for heading operations of company's research site at Bangalore.

The company, which commissioned a world class R&D centre dedicated to discovery in Pune early this month is also looking for expanding the scientific team at its Bangalore and Pune facilities with scientists of the same calibre.