AJINKYA INAMDAR, Senior Director (Global Medical Safety Strategy), BioNTech SE

Ajinkya has over 15 years in the pharma industry with leadership in the development of vaccines, cell and gene therapies and the planning and conduct of clinical trials. He has valuable experience in vaccine safety strategy from Sanofi, Janssen, and BioNTech where his product portfolio included vaccines against Influenza, meningitis, COVID-19, Ebola, HIV, Tuberculosis, malaria, HSV, monkeypox and E. coli. His products included vaccines in various stages of development (including FIH as well as marketed products). He has worked on products based on multiple platforms (recombinant protein, adenoviral, inactivated, and mRNA). In addition to many years of experience in safety strategy in clinical development, safety crisis management, Ajinkya has also consulted on small as well as large PV projects to build safety teams and to establish safety databases integrating automated case management and automated report generation where his clients included Sanofi, Novartis, Takeda, and JNJ.

Besides infectious diseases, he has previously worked in Oncology, Cell and Gene Therapy. Ajinkya completed his Medical Education (MBBS) from Shivaji University, India, a Master of Science (MS) in Molecular Biology from the University of Alabama (UA), followed by a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at UA. Before coming to the US, Ajinkya managed his own clinic, worked at a hospital as a General Physician and taught at a medical school. Besides Pharmacovigilance and Vaccine Development, Ajinkya is passionate about finding solutions to stress management, preservation of nature, and improving the quality and length of human life.