Academic journey
Mithilesh Kumar Yadav took a Bachelor of Pharmacy in Pharmaceutics at the Parul Institute of Pharmacy and Research, Vadodara, in 2021, and a Master of Pharmacy in the same discipline there in 2023. Between the two he settled on the question that still organises his work: how a dosage form can be engineered to put a drug where it is actually needed.
His undergraduate project surveyed probiotics and prebiotics — an area sitting at the join of pharmacy, nutrition and microbiological balance, and one that has moved from the margins of healthcare to the centre of it. His Master's project went further into technique, formulating and evaluating a dental scaffold of clindamycin produced by electrospinning, for use in periodontitis. Electrospinning is a way of making fibre matrices fine enough to hold and release a drug locally; applied to the periodontal pocket, it addresses a treatment problem that systemic antibiotics answer badly.
Since August 2023 he has worked as a Production Executive at Believe International Pvt. Ltd. in Kosamba, Gujarat, supervising the manufacture and packing of liquid and ointment products. The role is the other half of the discipline. He maintains batch records, logbooks, standard operating procedures, Batch Manufacturing Records and Batch Packing Records; plans and schedules production; performs his duties to cGMP at each stage; investigates deviations and non-conformances and carries them through corrective and preventive action; participates in change control; and coordinates with quality assurance, engineering, maintenance and materials management.
He also supervises and trains production staff, which is where the two halves meet. Pharmaceutical manufacturing, as he describes it, is not a production activity with quality bolted on; it is a controlled process in which quality, safety, consistency, documentation and regulatory compliance carry equal weight, and in which a team that does not understand why the procedure exists will eventually depart from it.
Alongside the work he has kept up an active research interest — poster presentations at an AICTE-sponsored international conference on engineered technology and novel drug delivery systems at Parul University and at an INDO-US conference at the Sharda School of Pharmacy, Gandhinagar, together with a GUJCOST-sponsored workshop on PBPK modelling, a national seminar on herbal medicines and nutraceuticals, a state convention of the Society of Pharmacognosy, and a programme on innovation in pharmaceutical science at Dharmsinh Desai University.
