Badrul Chowdhury, M.D., Ph.DSenior Vice President, R&D, and Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity iMED Head at MedimmuneSpeaker
Profile
Badrul A. Chowdhury is Senior Vice President and Head of the Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity (RIA) Innovative Medicines Unit at MedImmune. He leads the cross-functional team responsible for the strategy, growth, and advancement of MedImmune’s portfolio in this therapeutic area.
An internationally recognized expert in asthma, immunology and allergy research with considerable expertise in rheumatology and pulmonary diseases, Dr. Chowdhury was previously the Director, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Rheumatology Products, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the US Food and Drug Administration.
While at the FDA, Dr. Chowdhury provided scientific and regulatory oversight of medicines in highly prevalent diseases, such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, and less common but life-threatening diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, and vasculitides. He joined the US Food and Drug Administration in 1997, became the Director of Division of Pulmonary and Allergy Drug Products in 2002, and then the Director of the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Rheumatology Drug Products in 2010.
Dr. Chowdhury, a medical doctor trained and certified in Internal Medicine and in Allergy and Immunology, earned his medical degree from University of Dhaka in Bangladesh, and his PhD in Immunology from Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. He completed Internal Medicine Residency training from the Wayne State University School of Medicine and the Detroit Medical Center, Detroit, Michigan in 1991, and Allergy and Immunology Fellowship training from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland in 1995. Dr. Chowdhury had a teaching faculty appointment in the Department of Medicine at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Memphis, Tennessee from 1995 to 1997.
Dr. Chowdhury has published more than 50 papers. He has also served on numerous committees including the National Institutes of Health, and the United Nations Environment Program, where he led the US Food and Drug Administration team in the Montreal Protocol negotiations, a global agreement to protect the stratospheric ozone layer by phasing out the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances, including the global transition of chlorofluocarbons (CFCs) to non-CFC propelled medical use inhalers.