Ramesh Hariharan
Strand Life Sciences, Bengaluru
Ramesh Hariharan is the CEO and co-founder of Strand Life Sciences, Bengaluru, and an Adjunct Professor at IISc, Bengaluru. He did his B. Tech from IIT Delhi and his PhD from the Courant Institute, New York University. Following this, he moved to the Max Planck Institute as a postdoc and later spent ten years as full-time faculty working on algorithms research at IISc. At Strand, he straddles the fields of computer science and life science, working on algorithms that yield insights into biological systems and diseases. His recognitions include the MIT Technology Review TR100 list (2001), the first Devang Mehta award for IT (2002), and the Distinguished Alumnus of IITD (2015). He is also the author of Genomic Quirks. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and was selected as an Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences during 2000–2004 and later elected a Fellow in 2016.
Session
Data Not available
Industrializing genomic diagnoses in India
In instances of heritable disease with confounding phenotypic presentation, sequencing the genome is the only method to obtain a diagnosis. Genome sequencing in such a setting poses a number of challenges. A large number of genes have to be sequenced. The consequent data sizes are large, requiring large-scale algorithms. A large number of inconsequential mutations then have to be separated from true causative ones. This requires a number of different predictive methods, as well as the reading of the literature. All of this complexity adds cost, which is always constraining in the Indian setting. In this talk, the speaker will share his experiences in making each of these steps efficient and quick, and the consequent experiences in providing diagnoses for several thousand patients.