Anil Koul, Vice President - Global Public Health Research, Johnson & Johnson has joined Mankind Pharma as Group Chief Scientific Officer. 

As Group Chief Scientific Officer, he will head R&D functions in Mankind Pharma which presently has four R&D Centres in Mumbai, Gurugram, Sirmaur, and Dehradun. 

He has more than 25 years of experience in pharma drug discovery and early clinical development. Successfully advancing projects from initial stages of drug-discovery to human studies. More than five drug candidates from his team progressed to human trials including drugs like Rilematovir (Phase IIb), and Bedaquiline, which has been used in more than one million patients. 

He did his PhD and early training at Max Planck Institute in Germany in the lab of ‘Lasker Award’ winner, Prof. Axel Ullrich, who has discovered several oncology drugs including breast cancer drug, Herceptin. In Axel’s lab, Koul worked on kinases/phosphatases as Tx targets. 

At J&J, as Vice President of discovery & partnerships, Koul has been building cost-effective, innovation focused R&D programs. He is an ex-member of the Board of Directors of Janssen Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of J&J in Belgium, with fiduciary responsibilities. In that role, he helped build Belgium campus research and operations strategies in new areas like cell therapies etc. and promoted a sustainable research environment. 

He has experience across different therapeutic domains, including ID, and overseen programs in Neuroscience (e.g., Parkinson), Oncology etc. Expertise in small molecule discovery as well as large biologics including microbiomes-based & AI platforms. 

In the last 25 years, he has led science-based organizations across multiple geographies, including Asia, Europe, and the US. Expertise in setting up novel public-private partnerships and in 2021, successfully opened three J&J and external funded satellite discovery centers in Asia, Europe, and Africa. 

His experience is not limited to large pharma and biotech only, but he had a significant tenure at public research organizations. Between 2017-19, Koul was Director of the CSIR lab (Government of India), focused on biopharmaceuticals. He currently holds an additional role as Professor of Translation Discovery at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at London. 

He was part of the core team that led to discovery and development of Bedaquiline; listed as an "essential medicine" by the WHO for drug-resistant TB. Used in more than 170 countries. In 2020, American Chemical Society co-awarded him for this discovery. 

He has published articles in leading journals, such as Nature/Science and currently holds over 35 patents.