Innovative People

Pranesh Badami

Pranesh is a Ph.D in Plant Sciences (Botany) from the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India and has over 15 years experience in AgBiotech research and industry. Pranesh has worked in leading organizations such as the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) an FAO Agriculture R & D Centre where he served in various capacities such as Postdoctoral Fellow, Visiting Scientist and Visiting Scholar and worked for the improvement of Chickpea and Pigeonpea using wide hybridization, in vitro and biochemical techniques that is published in ‘Plant Breeding’. He moved on to work for Rice improvement in the Hybrid Rice Project at the Directorate of Rice Research Hyderabad, India -an Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) Institute for the selection and improvement of parental lines in Hybrid rice and at the Center for Plant Molecular Biology, Department of Genetics, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India for development of salt tolerant lines in Rice. He has also been responsible for establishment of a commercial Tissue Culture Laboratory for micro propagation of high value crops.

At the Monsanto Research Centre, Bangalore, India, Pranesh was a Senior Scientist and foundation team member of their Literature curation effort. He was actively involved in the development, population, maintenance of content & quality of scientific Literature databases using in silico methods and tools for literature / text mining. Pranesh has also nominated genes to Monsanto’s crop biotech pipeline, authored Lead reports and text-mined documents to help gene lead prioritization and phase advancement. He is the second author in US Patent
Application ‘Transgenic plants with enhanced Agronomic traits’ (US20090165165).

Pranesh is a recipient of Monsanto’s ‘Rapid Recognition Award’ for implementation of dB enhancements by interaction with IT colleagues and of the ‘Walk the Extra Mile award’ for meticulous QC, providing user feedback & training and enhanced IP capture in Research Notebooks.

Pranesh later moved into the role of ‘Technology Prospecting & IP Analyst’, Competitive Prospecting team at Monsanto and was responsible for identification of technical developments in areas of Plant transformation, Model systems, Precision Ag, etc by monitoring literature, IP, news, regulatory filings of GM crops, etc, of key trends, opportunities, threats, generating profiles, presentations, reports, alerts to facilitate business & strategy decisions on ‘path forward’ for licensing, collaborations, etc. He holds a ‘PG Diploma in Patent Law’ from the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) and WIPO’s Advance Course on 'Biotechnology and IP'.

Pranesh’s expertise and interests include IP Analytics, Technology & IP Landscaping, Company profiling, Competitive Intelligence and Technology prospecting, exploring use of new tools for such work and building networks with those who share similar interests. He is now engaged in advising and assisting Organizations and Biotech Companies on IP related issues, preparing Project proposals, Patentability/Prior Art, FTO analysis, Landscapes, etc.