Thought Leadership on Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR)

Given the impact of the pandemic on global health and well-being, anti- microbial resistance (AMR) has been identified as the lead theme for the TLF. The forum will be jointly chaired by Sir Tom Blundell and Prof N. K. Ganguly.

Sir Thomas Leon Blundell, (FRS FRSC FMedSci MAE) is a British biochemist, structural biologist, and science administrator. He was a member of the team of Dorothy Hodgkin that solved in 1969 the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin. Blundell has made contributions to the structural biology of polypeptide hormones, growth factors, receptor activation,  signal transduction, and DNA double-strand break repair, subjects important in cancer, tuberculosis, and familial diseases. He has developed software for protein modelling and understanding the effects of mutations on protein function, leading to new approaches to structureguided and Fragment-based lead discovery. In 1999 he co-founded the oncology company Astex Therapeutics, which has moved ten drugs into clinical trials.

Prof Nirmal Kumar Ganguly, M.D was formerly a Distinguished Biotechnology Research Professor, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. He was formerly President of the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), as well as that of the Asian Institute of Public Health, Bhubaneswar, Odisha. He is the former Director General, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi; former Director, PGIMER (Chandigarh); and former Director, National Institute of Biologicals (Noida). Prof. Ganguly has published more than 775 research papers and has supervised 130 Ph.D theses as Supervisor/Co-Supervisor. His major areas of research have been Tropical Diseases, Cardiovascular Diseases and Diarrhoeal Diseases. His interest encompasses the disciplines of Immunology, Biotechnology and Public Health.