Mr Vikas Bhatia

Mr Vikas Bhatia is a businessman in Jaipur, Rajasthan who got involved in promoting awareness for Inborn Errors of Metabolism (IEM) and Rare Genetic Disorders from the foundation called MERD India Foundation he started after his third son’s death. All the three were born with rare metabolic disease Pyruvate Carboxylase Deficiency. After that incident, he decided to help parents who are facing the similar kind of problem. Now his life’s objective is to provide moral and informative support to the parents of IEMs suffering children and to campaign newborn screening in India.

Dr Meenakshi Bhat

Dr Meenakshi Bhat is a genetic counsellor at the Centre for Human Genetics, Bengaluru, Karnataka. She has a Post Graduate degree in Paediatrics from the Diplomate of National Board (DNB) and Diploma in Child Health (DCh) and MRCP, UK. She has worked as a consultant in Clinical Genetics at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. Her interests lie in Clinical Genetics including Clinical Dysmorphology, Syndromes associated with Congenital Heart Disease and Genetic Counselling.

Dr Rohit Cariappa

Dr Rohit Cariappa is a Board Certified Clinical Chemist whose experience spans research and industry and also the Lab Head and Co-Founder of NeoGen Labs Pvt Ltd. Prior to NeoGen Labs, Rohit worked with Medtronic (Minneapolis, USA), Washington University (St. Louis, USA), Heart Research Institute (Sydney, Australia) and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (Baltimore, USA). Rohit leads the First Step Newborn Screening program at NeoGen Labs. Rohit received his PhD. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Florida.

Mr Thomas Mookken

Mr Thomas Mookken is the CEO and Co-Founder of NeoGen Labs Pvt Ltd. He has a background in high technology and has worked primarily in the telecommunications industry in technical and marketing roles. He became interested in Newborn Screening when it was discovered, through a Newborn Screening Test, that his son had G6PD Deficiency. Thomas received his MS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr Subhadra Dravida

Dr Subhadra Dravida is the Founder of Transcell, a company that is built on proprietary adult stem cell technology platform while both the research and product offerings were panned out of the repository. Transcell Biolife is the next-gen bio-bank for the intended applications thrusting on its derived applications and not as any form of Bio-insurance. Biolife offers bio-banking products as a service with its potential use for therapeutic and non-therapeutic purposes aligning with the advancements in international standards.

Dr Charitha Gangadharan

Dr Charitha is a scientist trained Cell and Molecular Biology during her doctoral work at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), Hyderabad and post-doctoral work at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru. She is at present associated with Narayana Hrudayalaya as a research scientist focussing on developing in vitro model systems in oral cancer that may provide a bridging platform to extrapolate preclinical data to human conditions. In parallel, she is also involved in a team who are on the lookout for novel biomarkers that have the potential to classify at-risk patients into various categories to prevent type 2 diabetes.