As Vice President, Research, Karthik Viswanathan provides leadership to several discovery programs and is responsible for Visterra’s computational and protein engineering platforms.
Karthik joined Visterra in 2009 as its founding scientist and helped establish the Hierotope™ platform that has led to discovery and development of several therapeutics. He is an inventor of multiple drugs in different stages of clinical development including VIS649 (Sibeprenlimab) and VIS954. Karthik has authored over 40 publications in top-tiered journals including mAbs, Science, Cell, New England journal of Medicine and Nature Biotechnology in areas spanning protein engineering, therapeutic development, structural biology, glycobiology and infectious diseases. In addition, he is an inventor on over 50 patent and patent applications related to therapeutics products, technology platforms and vaccine design.
Prior to Visterra, Dr. Viswanathan was a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he worked on protein engineering technologies that eventually laid the foundation for Visterra. Karthik received his Bachelor of Technology in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, and a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University (JHU).