Dr Gagandeep Kang, a professor of Microbiology at the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory division of Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College, Vellore is hailed as India’s vaccine grandmother. She has developed an indigenous oral vaccine against rotavirus that causes diarrheal infections.
According to the World Health Organisation, the rotavirus kills around 4,53,000 children under 5 years of age worldwide and is the major threat to the health of children especially in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Gagandeep has been doing research in diarrheal diseases in babies and infants since 1990. She was one of the chief investigators in the Phase 111 clinical trials of the rotavirus vaccine which India launched as part of the national immunization program in 2016.
She has many firsts to her credit. She is the first Indian and the first woman to edit Mansoor’s Textbook of Tropical Medicine, a prestigious publication on tropical infectious diseases. She has served as the executive director of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in Faridabad, Haryana and has co-authored a book ”Till We Win India’s fight against The COVID-19 Pandemic” along with Chandrakant Lahariya and Randeep Guleria.
