Kunal S. Taskar PhD, BPharm

Kunal Taskar, Ph.D., is currently working as an Associate GSK Fellow and Scientific Leader at GlaxoSmithKline, U.K. in Mechanistic Safety and Disposition, IVIVT R&D department. He is the transporter expert at the GSK UK site and consults on drug transporter related project questions from early drug discovery to post-marketing drug development. His past experience includes working as a drug transporter expert in the DMPK Pharmaceutical Candidate Optimization department at Biocon Bristol-Myers Squibb Research and Development. Kunal completed his doctorate and postdoctoral research at Texas Tech University Health Sciences department, USA, in Quentin Smith’s lab with research focused on drug delivery to central nervous system and role of transporters in drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier (BBB).

Kunal’s experience and research focus include: drug-drug interaction predictions using PBPK models and mechanistic understanding of the clinically occurring drug–drug interactions; transporter mediated drug delivery and intracellular drug concentrations, especially the role of uptake and efflux transporters in drug pharmacokinetics-pharmacodynamics and disease and toxicology; novel transporters and role in drug disposition (research on critical role of novel transporters at the BBB); improvising current transporter assays and models for drug transporter studies and clinical predictions; and use of endogenous probes for drug mediated transporter modulations.

Kunal is a member of American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) and the International Brain Barriers Society. Kunal is also a member of the Predictive Safety Testing Consortium Hepatox-BSEP working group and member of the International Transporter Consortium Whitepaper 2018 effort focused on bile salt export pump transporter.