Vijay Chandru, PhD

Dr. Chandru has served as a director since October 2019.  Currently, Dr. Chandru is a co-founder of OPFORD Foundation, a non-profit in India with an open platform for orphan diseases and with a mission to support development of affordable and accessible therapeutics for orphan diseases of which many are rare genetic disorders. He was also a co-founder of Strand Life Sciences, India’s leading precision medicine solutions company, an offshoot of the Indian Institute of Science, which now has over 20 diagnostic laboratories and over 800 employees spread across India.  He served as Executive Chairman of Strand Life Sciences from 2000 to 2018.  A technology pioneer of the World Economic Forum since 2006, he was elected President (2009-2012) of the Association of Biotech Led Enterprises (ABLE), the apex trade body that represents the Indian biotech industry.  Dr. Chandru is an academic entrepreneur whose academic career has spanned almost four decades.  After his doctoral work at MIT he was a tenured professor at Purdue University for a decade in the 1980s and at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore since then.  A fellow of both the academy of science and engineering, he is currently an Indian National Academy of Engineering’s Distinguished Technologist in Bio-Engineering.