About BioInfi

BioInfi is a specialized biopharma diligence and strategy practice. We help teams make defensible go, no-go, and prioritization decisions by integrating human evidence, biology, clinical history, and competitive risk into decision-grade outputs.

Pankaj Agarwal, PhD, Founder

Dr. Pankaj Agarwal has 25+ years of strategic and hands-on experience applying bioinformatics to drug discovery and pipeline value creation. He has collaborated with pharmaceutical project teams, academic and biotech partners, and top informatics talent across target discovery, translational strategy, repurposing, and diligence.

• 50+ publications in leading journals, including Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Nature Biotechnology, and Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics
• Multiple methodological and gene patents
• Appointed Senior Fellow at GSK (2016)
• Service on NSF, NIH, FDA, and PhRMA panels
• B.Tech., Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Delhi, PhD, Computer Science, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU
• Founder and senior member, International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB)

He is particularly motivated by drug discovery in rare disease and by work that meaningfully improves outcomes for patients.

Selected engagement types

Examples of the types of work we have delivered. Details and references can be shared under NDA.

• Strategy evaluation, platform assessment, and portfolio recommendations for an innovative biotech building target-degrading antibodies
• Genomics strategy and target selection using orthologs and human genetics for a genomics-platform biotech
• Multiple diligence projects on AI drug discovery companies for foundations, investment firms, and biotechs
• Target identification for a Series B startup
• Indication expansion strategy for a clinical-stage asset
• Disease-area strategic plan for a mid-size pharma (targets, biomarkers, clinical discovery, repurposing)
• Strategic evaluation and alignment of a biomarker application
• Advisory on UTI antibiotic recommendations informed by RT-PCR assays
• Specialized recruiting for physician and clinical leadership roles (examples available on request)

Highlights from Dr. Agarwal’s GSK tenure

Selected examples of scope and leadership, summarized for readability.

• Led multiple target identification efforts producing actionable shortlists, partnering with bioinformaticians, disease biologists, and screening teams
• Built and led an internal repurposing initiative, Systematic Drug Repositioning (SyDR), generating and validating hypotheses across 10+ disease areas
• Evaluated the potential for a rare disease unit and identified seed opportunities across repurposing and target discovery
• Supported multiple disease areas on diligence, in-licensing, and target selection across modalities
• Identified and advanced rare-to-common target opportunities through rigorous genetics, biology, literature, and tractability review
• Led evaluation of targets for gene therapy programs
• Trained and upskilled bioinformatics teams in deep learning and AI methods applied directly to drug discovery problems
• Contributed to oncology response biomarker and combination prediction efforts
• Invented early gene set enrichment methodology and extended it to multi-locus settings, building comprehensive gene set collections
• Helped assemble large-scale interaction datasets and co-developed network mining algorithms
• Led design and build of internal portals and toolkits used by 1000+ scientists for gene, disease, and omics workflows
• Led analyses of scientific innovation in disease areas for R&D leadership, informing R&D redesign, with selected results published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
• Developed KOL and hiring strategies by disease area, plus in-licensing analyses supporting portfolio strategy

Work with us

If you are preparing a portfolio review, board meeting, fundraising, or partner diligence, we can scope the right diligence package quickly.