Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Director of Clinical Affairs and Partnerships, Claret Bioscience
Biography
Dr. Varsha Rao is the Director of Partnerships and Clinical Affairs at ClaretBio. She oversees the clinical applications of the novel next-generation sequence assays and analytical pipelines developed at ClaretBio with a main focus on evaluating the utility of cell-free DNA fragmentation patterns in cancer progression and treatment response monitoring. Before joining ClaretBio, she was a Research Scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine in Prof Michael Snyder’s lab. As a part of multiple consortia such as the Integrative Personalized Omics Profiling Project, the Human Microbiome Project and the NASA Twins Study she has worked on longitudinal multiomic analyses, focusing on applying transcriptomics and liquid biopsy approaches to understand nuances of metabolic diseases, cancer, infectious disease and general health. She received her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2012.
Talk
Clinical Dx Showcase:
Claret Bioscience
Claret Bioscience's mission is to improve the quality of NGS data obtained from degraded, highly fragmented, and low yield samples. Our approach aims to provide a complete picture of DNA molecules, enhancing the sensitivity of disease screenings, and ultimately improving treatment decisions.
Getting the complete story - cfDNA fragmentomics
Capturing cfDNA fragmentation information can potentially enable clinical diagnoses at low depth of sequencing.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2023 Silicon Valley
Track Chair: Cindy Perettie, Roche
- PMWC 2023 Award Ceremony
- Luis Alberto Diaz Jr., MSK
- Razelle Kurzrock, Medical College of Wisconsin - Non-invasive Liquid Biopsy Techniques (PANEL)
Chair: Razelle Kurzrock, Medical College of Wisconsin
- Apostolia Tsimberidou, MD Anderson
- Mandana Kamgar, MD Medical College of Wisconsin
- Mina Nikanjam, UCSD
- Ash Alizadeh, Stanford University - Liquid Biopsy Challenges and Limitations (PANEL)
Chair: Victor Lin, Mary Bird Perkins
- Luis Alberto Diaz Jr., MSK
- Maximilian Diehn, Stanford
- Dana Dilbeck, Agilent
- Emma Shtivelman, Cancer Commons - Liquid Biopsy in Clinical Trials: Learnings and COVID Experience (PANEL)
Chair: Cindy Perettie, Roche Diagnostics
- Eric Peters, Genenetch
- Andrew Mckenzie, Sarah Cannon
- Yang Pan, Gilead
- Alan Sandler, Mirati Therapeutics - Multi-Cancer Early Detection Through Multi-Biomarker Class Liquid Biopsy Testing
Chair: Tom Beer, Exact Sceinces
- Liquid Biopsy for Early Cancer Detection (PANEL)
Chair: Priti Hegde, Foundation Medicine
- Daniel Kim, UCSC
- Mike Nolan, Freenome
- Jeffrey Venstrom, Grail Bio
- Kathryn Phillips, UCSF
- Lon Castle, eviCore healthcare
- Tom Beer, Exact Sciences - Liquid Biopsy for Minimal Residual Disease (PANEL)
Chair: Minetta Liu, Natera
- Peter Bach, Delfi diagnostics
- Laura Vantveer, UCSF
- Susan Bobulsky, Adaptive
- Joshua Cohen, Johns Hopkins
- PMWC Showcase
- Harmeet Dhani, Biological Dynamics
- Varsha Rao, Claret Bio - PMWC NCI Showcase
- Xianghong Jasmine Zhou, EarlyDiagnostics
