Room 008, Amrut Mody School of Management
Central Campus
The world of medicine is changing rapidly, and the tools we use to fight disease are evolving just as quickly. Traditional approaches to drug discovery are struggling with high costs, long timelines, and the challenge of drug resistance. In this Masterclass, we will explore how systems biology helps us understand diseases at a deeper, network level, and how synthetic biology allows us to design programmable solutions—therapies that can sense, respond, and adapt inside the cancer cell.
Professor Anu Raghunathan is Chief Scientist in the Chemical Engineering Division at CSIR–National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, where she leads the Metabolic Inquiry and Cellular Engineering (MICE) group. Her research spans metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, and systems biology, with applications in drug resistance in cancer, bioplastics, and genome-scale modeling. She played a key role in COVID-19 genome surveillance in India, including the first detection of Omicron in Pune. Professor Raghunathan is an editor for leading international journals, founding member of the Bioengineering Society of India, and a recipient of the 2022 FICCI FLO award for women achievers in science and technology.