Rajat Desikan is a Director in the infectious diseases and vaccines therapeutic areas within the Clinical Pharmacology Modelling & Simulation group at GSK (UK). He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science and then conducted his postdoctoral work on viral dynamics modelling of HIV-1 disease and computational vaccinology. After his postdoc, he chose to enter the pharma industry by joining an immuno-oncology startup as a modeler and worked on a novel immunotherapy against triple negative breast cancer. He then transitioned to the QSP division of Certara UK with Prof. Piet van der Graaf, and in collaboration with AstraZeneca headed the development of a state-of-the-art QSP model of human in vivo immune responses upon COVID-19 vaccination. Rajat has also collaboratively worked on preclinical and clinical-stage projects, where novel QSP platform models were developed and refined to identify mechanisms of action for drug-classes, support go/no-go decisions for specific pipeline drugs, inform clinical study design and biomarker identification, and evaluate drug combinations.
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