Dr Urvish Pandya, an organic chemist, has more than 25 years of experience, ranging from fundamental research to industrial manufacture. His core experience covers the full spectrum of small molecule pharmaceutical development; preclinical, clinical, and commercial, including quality technical and regulatory aspects of drug substance development.
A snapshot of his experience is below:
Read more about Dr Urvish Pandya...
… as a chemist he has solid grounding in experimental work and design. He worked hands on in the lab till 2012, performing synthetic chemistry at various scales before moving into leadership and management roles. He is skilled at what to experiment, how to experiment, how to analyse, and what to look out for.
In the early 90s he was developing chemical processes for APIs based on limited information from chemical abstracts, theoretical knowledge, experimenting, and observing the reactions he performed. He learned that by observing the reactions one performs, a good chemist gains a lot of vital insights. This observation skill helped him scale-up and problem solve quite a few processes.
At the same time academic experience and interest keeps him rooted to fundamental principles, which is often missed in industrial setting, especially at late-stage manufacturing, but essential for risk assessments, and root cause analyses when things do not go to plan.
During his long experience, Dr Urvish Pandya has had the opportunity to experience variety of chemistries and molecules, at different scales. He has faced and solved many different challenges, at different scales, during this journey.
Majority of his experience, has been in pharmaceutical service sector, developing new drug substances (NCEs) and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).
The opportunities he had, covers the full range of drug substance and API development cycle: concept to commercialisation.
Having worked with early phase Contract Research Organisations (CROs), he has developed NCE’s for big and small pharma companies for their early preclinical development: route scouting, solid form selection, crystallisation, salt screening and initial scale-up, including first GMP manufacture.
He has also worked within Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisation (CDMOs) for clinical and late phase development involving PR&D and CMC activities: route optimisation, impurity tracking and removal, designing processes based on QbD principles, setting specifications, scale-up and validating processes, tech- transfers, commercial manufacture of APIs to the desired crystal form and size, and preparation of data for regulatory submissions.
This long and diverse blend of experience is the basis of his creative, innovative, and technical mindset.
His creativity is demonstrated by filing of patents even in CRO & CDMO environments. During his tenure in bio refining, he developed two out of the three technologies the company had to offer and filed for 6 patents in 2 years.
Even though everyone has access to the same information, he has been differentiating by being able to think out of the box and providing creative solutions. This is the inspiration behind the name Allotrope and the logo.
Allotropes are different structural forms of the same element and can exhibit quite different properties and behaviours. The notion of thinking outside a perceived “box” is related to a traditional topographical puzzle called the nine dots puzzle and the letter A of allotrope is formed using the pattern to connect the nine dots.
He founded Allotrope Scientific Ltd in 2021 to share his experience more widely and enable innovators.
Dr Shashi PANDYA
Director | Consultant
Dr Shashi Pandya has 20 years of experience in research and development, within academia and industry. Trained as a synthetic chemist has worked on bio-active heterocycles, organometallics, natural products, asymmetric synthesis, and catalysis.
In an industrial setting she has applied her skills in synthesizing advanced materials with applications in diagnostics, electronics, sensors, medical imaging, and healthcare.
She has strong project management experience and has worked on multidisciplinary projects that involved managing process teams, biosensor teams, physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, customers, subcontractors, and collaborators (international). The projects benefitted immensely from her ability in materials and electronic devices to solve healthcare and environmental problems and deploy new products. She has a history of formulating innovative ideas into actionable projects by bringing in required partnerships (International) and securing funds to the tune of 1M GBP to develop them into a product (Newton Bhabha Grant-Innovate UK, Horizon-2020 and Global Challenge Research Fund.
As General manager in her earlier role, she has gained the experience of managing teams, company resources across multiple locations, finance(P&L), hiring/training of staff, and managing the IP portfolio for the company. More recently, she is the monitoring officer for 30 innovation projects for Innovate UK.
With such a wealth of experience Shashi will be driving the innovative R&D projects at Allotrope Scientific. She will develop collaborative R&D by bringing in grant funding, and strategic partners and working alongside business development and marketing teams.
