The Genome Bridge is “Not For Profit Organization” with a mandate to create access to genomic data relevant to disease management and therapy through clinical genomics approaches.
The broad and overlying areas of our mandate will be restricted to and cover the disease areas with currently known clinical genomic approaches. (specifically Rare, Undiagnosed and Genetic Diseases).
We are on the mission to mitigate the inequities in genomic medicine and provide access to the latest diagnostic technologies to Indian patients.
Phase 1 – Our primary mandate is to provide massively cost-subsidized Whole Genome Sequencing and analytics services for patients suffering from Undiagnosed Disease.
Phase 2 – We will extend the above disease area in a gated and phased manner to include Rare Genetic disorders.
Phase 3 – Eventually we will address other disease areas including Oncology, Common diseases, etc.
We will partner with existing Service Providers in the Genomics Eco-system to access “patient-consented” clinical data including “Whole Genome Sequence (WGS)” information for Trios.
We will run a case-customized Bio-informatics pipeline (personalized genomics) for the Trio and generate a report.
We will work with the consulting clinician to interpret and communicate the report to patients.
We will provide periodic updates and guidance to work with our partner networks and to provide access to updated status information on disease and therapeutic progress.
• Cost-de-limited access to Genomic Diagnostic checks
• Establish India-specific Guidance for Diagnostic prescription.
• Establish Clinical Report generating Computational platform
• Establish a de-facto disease database for the Indian population.
• Fuel Genomic Diagnostic growth in India to become SOC.
• Encourage innovation in Public Health initiatives.
Ramesh – Dr. Ramesh Hariharan is Co-founder and CTO at Strand, and Adjunct Professor at the Computer Science Department of the Indian Institute of Science. At Strand, over the last 15 years, Ramesh has lead teams building analytical tools for high-throughput molecular profiling; these tools are widely used and have been cited in several thousand publications. More recently, Ramesh and the team at Strand have been working on technology to make DNA sequencing for genetic disease diagnosis affordable in India. Ramesh’s research contributions in computer science include fast algorithms for several algorithmic problems. Ramesh is a recipient of the TR100 Award (2002) of Young Innovators by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine and in 2003 received the Global Indus Technovator Award from MIT, instituted to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide.
Ramesh got his Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, his PhD from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, and subsequently did a Post-Doc at the Max-Planck Institut fur Informatik in Saarbrucken, Germany.
Ramesh was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. His alma mater, IIT – Delhi, recognized him as a Distinguished Alumnus in the year 2015.
Ashok – Dr. Ashok Gopinath is the ex-commercial head for Illumina India. He has led the commercial activities for Illumina in India from March 2014 until Dec 2018. He has spent several years in leadership roles in Drug Discovery companies like Connexios Life Sciences Pvt Ltd, Genotypic Technology India ltd. and Sanofi Synthelabo between the years of 2008 and 2014. Previous to this he has conducted research projects in Neurobiology in the prestigious Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA for several years. He has a PhD from the Dept. of Biochemistry, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and a Masters degree in Microbiology from MS University in Baroda.
He has a vision to extract the value in cutting edge technologies to improve the value of human life in India by increasing access of India’s patient population to modern life-saving clinical practises.