Umesh Gangadharmath, Ph.D is Senior Vice President, Technical Operations and has focused his career on radiopharmaceutical development and manufacturing in both academic and commercial settings. He has over 16 years of experience in researching and developing novel radiopharmaceuticals in the areas of oncology, cardiology and neurology for use in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging and has established GMP radiopharmaceutical manufacturing sites globally to support clinical trials. Dr. Gangadharmath’s breadth of expertise spans from preclinical development, support of CMC sections for IND submissions, early clinical research, through full clinical production. Most recently, he was Chief Operating Officer at Optimal Tracers, a CDMO with the responsibility of supporting radiopharmaceutical production for biopharmaceutical companies. He spent the last 10 years building Optimal Tracers from concept to a mature, fully functioning GMP radiopharmaceutical manufacturing facility. Dr. Gangadharmath and his team at Optimal Tracers were also involved in establishing a fully GMP radiopharmaceutical manufacturing facility for clinical research at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. Dr. Gangadharmath has held previous roles as Director for the biomedical cyclotron facility at UCLA and as Senior Scientist, Radiochemistry at Siemens Molecular Imaging Biomarker Research. He was part of the team that invented TAUVID during his work at Siemens Molecular Imaging Biomarker Research (Flortaucipir; Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly and Company) for imaging tau pathology and is well-published in the field of radiopharmaceuticals. He also has served as a member of United States Pharmacopeia (USP) Radioactive Drugs Expert Panel and played a key role in setting up a molecular imaging program at Loma Linda University Medical Center. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D in Inorganic Chemistry from Karnatak University Dharwad, India and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA under the supervision of Dr. Hartmuth Kolb.
