Dr Harleen Kaur is an Indian national who moved to the U.S.A three years ago. Dr Kaur received her bachelor’s degree in biotechnology from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University in Delhi and doctorate degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering from National University of Singapore. Presently, she is working as a scientist at AstraZeneca, US and is driving critical technical transfer process for two biologics products and providing technical support for biopharmaceutical manufacturing. AstraZeneca has awarded her for her outstanding performance and leading efforts in driving the continuous improvement project at their operations site in India. Dr Kaur is passionate about the drug development process right from the basic research in the laboratories to manufacturing and distribution of the drugs to the patients. She is strongly committed to relentless pursuit in developing new drugs for unmet medical needs.
Her doctoral work involved probing high affinity aptamer sequences in a DNA aptamer against VEGF165 protein and investigating the antiproliferative activity of the obtained high affinity aptamer on cancer cells. The novel stem-loop structural modification strategy used during her PhD work resulted in a high binding affinity and high specificity aptamer sequence which has lot of potential in oligonucleotide based cancer therapeutics and diagnostic applications. Post-PhD, she worked in R&D division of Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd in Singapore where she continued her work on aptamer development and played an integral role in identifying aptamers against different protein targets in collaboration with National University of Singapore, Agency of Science Technology and Research Singapore, and Japanese diagnostic enterprise Sysmex.
Dr Kaur remarkable and innovative research work has been published and mentioned in highly regarded peer-reviewed journals, books and patents and has been cited by prominent drug discovery and drug development experts. The links for her some of her scientific work could be find below. She has been invited to present her work at many international conferences including prestigious Proteins and Biopharma Asia Congress held in 2012 in Singapore and EMBO Chemical Biology 2010 conference in Germany. She has judged the scientific work of other researchers worldwide. She has co-chaired Rx-360 “Fighting Fakes” conference organized in Washington DC, USA in 2015 which was attended by over 100 industry leaders across pharmaceutical and healthcare sector. In addition, she is currently holding a leadership position in Healthcare Businesswomen Association (HBA) mid-Atlantic region in the US. Dr Kaur is a high achiever with both academic and industry accolades and will be a great asset to the United States and rest of the world.
