He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco and was employed as a scientist at Genentech from 1980 to 1989, where his team characterized the cytokines TNF-alpha and TNF-beta.
Aggarwal was Chief of the Cytokine Research Section, Department of Clinical Immunology, Bioimmunotherapy, Experimental Therapeutics at MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas in Houston from 1989 to 2015.
[8][11] SignPath Pharma, a company seeking to develop liposomal formulations of curcumin, in 2013 licensed three patents from Aggarwal related to that approach.
[5][1] In June 2016, following an investigation by MD Anderson Cancer Center, the journal Molecular Pharmacology retracted two of Aggarwal's papers, citing “inappropriate” or “unacceptable” image manipulation.
[16][3][17][1] In September 2018, an additional nine articles by Aggarwal were retracted in journals published by the American Association for Cancer Research.