Science, Technology, Innovation
The journey into life and health science for Professor Chandru which began in the mid-90s has been a story of science meets technology that leads to innovation – the way it is supposed to work.
Molecular biology got a great boost in the late 80s when the human genome project was conceived and the US and UK governments together pumped in around 3B$ of funding over the next 15 years to get the human reference genome sequenced and verified. The transduction of biology that happened as a consequence required the “best in class” computer science to stand shoulder to shoulder with the biologists to make sense of the huge amounts of data that started spewing out of the high precision and high throughput instruments that were flooding the market.
Applied Biosystems, Agilent, Affymetrix, Thermo Fisher, BioRad, Qiagen, Roche… the 4th paradigm of science had arrived with a bang in biology and the community of biologists were unprepared. Strand appeared on the scene early in this phase and rapidly began to partner with researchers from around the world who had the wherewithal to set up outstanding experiments but needed help with the data analysis.
While Strand hitched its future to a “software products” business and partnered with Agilent on the GeneSpring® platform, a number of research collaborations resulted as several biology labs were looking for solutions and not just products. Strand’s scientists were co-authors in a number of high quality publications, including two articles in Cell that made the cover in 2010 – a selective list of these publications is on the website at http://strandls.com/strand-publications/
In 2010, Strand also ventured into setting up the first next-generation sequencing lab in Bangalore in an interesting public-private partnership called Ganit Labs with central and state government participation. This was the Bio-IT Centre that were set up at the Institute for Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology in South Bangalore. The scientists at Strand were delighted to get back to the wet lab bench and so in the last 5 years, Strand also generates experimental data in house. Ganit Labs successfully assembled the genome of the Neem Tree (Azadirachta indica).
2011 - 2017
Strand Ramanujan
In 2012, the founders and management decided to transform Strand into a new generation healthcare company. This bold strategic decision was motivated by the emerging impact of genomics in healthcare and the opportunity for a life sciences company with deep data science capabilities like Strand to push the envelope.
1995 - 2010
Data Science in Biology: The Avadis Story
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout.
Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
1998 - 2005
Bridging the Digital Divide with a People's Computer
The Simputer project grew out of a multi-disciplinary dialogue conducted at the National Institute of Advanced Studies by its director Prof R Narasimha, the venerated social anthropologist Prof MN Srinivas and a dynamic young IAS officer Sanjay Biswas who was the IT Secretary of Karnataka in 1998.
1988 - 1998
Foundations of Artificial Intelligence - Automated Theorem Proving
Automated Theorem Proving, the cornerstone of “Strong AI”, refers to the ability to create intelligent machines that can implement the formal rules of deductive inference (modus ponens and modus tollens) and derive formal inferences from a set of axioms.
1985 - 1995
Computational Geometry, Manufacturing and 3D Printing
As a young assistant professor at Purdue, Chandru developed a new research area for himself around the computer manipulation of planar and solid geometric objects.
1977 - 1997
Algorithms and Complexity in Combinatorial Optimization
Chandru’s doctoral dissertation work was in the computational complexity of combinatorial optimization. Theoretical computer scientists and logicians had developed a hierarchy of computation and the focus in the late 70s was on positioning practical engineering design problems on combinatorial and discrete structures in this hierarchical framework.