"Making Cancer Diagnosis Easy and Affordable is my Focus," says Vivek Tanavde on Being Nominated to Highly Prestigious Sigma Xi Society

Inside Vivek Tanavde’s lab, a focused group of researchers and doctoral students are busy developing saliva-based diagnostics for cancer. With liquid biopsies becoming increasingly important in cancer diagnosis, given their ease of collection and their accuracy in reflecting molecular changes happening in tumours, especially hard-to-reach ones, saliva-based diagnostics are gaining ground. Professor Tanavde, Associate Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, leads the Oral Cancer Research Cluster at the University. “Making cancer diagnosis easy and affordable is the big challenge in this area. My lab seeks to address this challenge,” he says. 

Last week, Professor Tanavde was nominated to the Sigma Xi Society, one of the oldest scientific research honour societies in the world. The Society is a multidisciplinary  community of science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) professionals dedicated to research excellence, promoting public engagement with science, and fostering the next generation of researchers. Over 200 Nobel Prize winners have been Sigma Xi members, including theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, particle physicist Richard Feynman, chemist Linus Pauling, cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock, and, more recently, biochemist Jennifer Doudna. Professor Tanavde says, “Being nominated to the Sigma Xi Society’s distinguished community of researchers is an absolute honour. It gives me the chance to pay forward by mentoring younger colleagues and to plug into a global network of elite researchers who believe in solving complex problems facing the world through active scientific collaboration” 

The challenge of isolating good quality RNA from saliva has hindered previous efforts to use saliva for liquid biopsy. Professor Tanavde aims to solve this problem by studying RNA from salivary exosomes. Previously, his laboratory in Singapore identified how bone marrow-derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells grew and differentiated (Ng Blood 2008). They identified regulatory networks that control various functions in these cells (Koh BMC Genomics 2010), like becoming a bone cell or a cartilage cell or a fat cell. Professor Tanavde explains, “Think of these regulators as traffic signals that regulate traffic at a busy intersection. At Ahmedabad University, we use the same approach to identify similar signalling regulators in oral cancer cells. These regulators are also early harbingers of cancer and can be used for detection even before the tumour becomes a patch or a mass in the mouth.”

Professor Tanavde’s research interests span Adult Stem Cells, miRNA Regulation of Cell Differentiation, Cancer Biomarkers, and Connecting Transcriptome to Cellular Phenotype. He obtained his PhD from the Cancer Research Institute, Mumbai (1999) in Applied Biology. For over a decade, he was a Principal Investigator at the Bioinformatics Institute, Singapore. As the Head of the Hematopoietic Stem Cell Lab at Reliance Life Sciences in Mumbai, his work focused on developing mesenchymal stem cell based therapies for cardiac and neuronal disorders. He worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr Curt Civin at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Centre, Johns Hopkins University, on the expansion of hematopoietic stem cells from umbilical cord blood. Professor Tanavde was also the Secretary of the Stem Cell Society, Singapore, and presently also serves on the Live Education and Delivery Task Force of the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC).