Tell me about yourself and your journey as an entrepreneur

I have a PhD in Cell Biology from IISc, Bangalore. I have worked in USA, Singapore and India before starting OncoStem Diagnostics. During my stint as a doctorate student at IISc, a close friend was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer (usually Stage I or II). She underwent surgery and elated that she was on the road to recovery. Unfortunately, the cancer recurred and metastasised (spread to other organs in the body). Despite aggressive treatment, my friend succumbed to the illness. This incident led me to wonder if there could be better way to understand cancer and the way it takes over a host's body. Could there be a way to gauge a patient's course of treatment based on the ‘aggressiveness’ of the tumour and therefore risk of cancer recurrence. I spoke to various oncologists across India to assess the need for such a product. The doctors were very clear that there was a gap in the market and an affordable solution that can tell them more about the tumour to plan a treatment was greatly needed. I founded OncoStem Diagnostics in 2011 and started approaching hospitals and biostatisticians to get working on the development of the test. I approached 60 hospitals and ultimately OncoStem has worked with 12 hospitals in India to make CanAssist Breast (CAB) a reality. We launched CAB in 2016 and increasing our market traction year on year.  

How are you leveraging AI to detect cancer? 

I am essentially a cell biologist and not a specialist in AI. I learnt about AI on the job as we needed to use that tool to build our product. We use a cutting-edge machine learning-based algorithm which predicts the risk of recurrence for every patient. Machine learning is known to be a more advanced tool to develop prognostic tests where patterns of patient information need to be understood and analyzed. Support vector machine-based models maximize diagnostic accuracy, thereby improving patient outcomes. Machine learning-based methods also have flexible "transfer functions," which allow them to model complex processes such as tumour recurrence, hence we choose them.

What challenges do women face in building a tech career? How can the business community and society address this issue collectively and efficiently?

The biggest challenge is managing work-life balance. Other than that often what women speak at times goes unheard, women fear for some or no reason that they are not good, they do not know enough, they do not fit in. Getting back to work after a maternity or health related break can be a big issue in building a tech career. Society, community and family members can help women by giving them assurance, confidence that they are technically very good and encourage to study, take up challenging posts, tours. Government should have women friendly policies which include men in the system. For eg, the mandated six-month maternity leave can extend to include paternity leave as well, giving a chance and choice to the woman to return to work earlier. Have a secure system at home to take care of children and family. I personally think that beyond the support from family and society, women should also help themselves by knowing their own capability and be confident in that. They should not feel shy to express themselves, and also should not feel that they have to provide everything to the family, other family members should chip in too. 

What qualities do women inherently bring to the table that make them assets in a tech company?

Women bring discipline, cost efficiency and a fairly open attitude to work which are critical to succeed. They do not hesitate to ask for help especially if they do not understand something -which helps speed up things.  

How do you think start-ups are moving the needle in terms of supporting more women to participate in tech building/development? 

Start-ups have flexible policies, work from home policies and do welcome women who have taken a break thus help women to get back into workforce.

What's the one thing that you see AI transforming completely? 

AI has huge potential to transform multiple areas of life. I find the fascinating areas being reducing load on pathologists to a large extent. AI will be very very helpful in that aspect to give accurate and timely diagnosis. Another area I find very fascinating is role of AI in drug discovery. The hope is that use of AI/ML in drug discovery will not only help significantly reduce the cost of introducing new drugs to the market, but also make the drug discovery process faster (currently 10-15 years including clinical trials) and more cost-effective (currently costs almost 1 billion USD per new drug). It can help reduce costs tremendously and that will do greater good by reducing cost of medicines in the clinic. 

What is your biggest AI nightmare?

AI at the end of the day relies completely on humans to give it excellent, accurate data and while it can sift through data fast it does not have the capability to understand what is correct, relevant etc. We must ensure that the data going in to make the AI based algorithms must be of the highest quality/standards, most accurate, in depth and detailed to ensure we get most accurate algorithms in return. My worst nightmare is exactly this that models built on bad, inaccurate data affecting patients/society. 

What's your advice for other women who want to pursue a journey similar to yours?

Be absolutely focused on your goal and have full faith, confidence in your capabilities to achieve it. There will be many many distractions along the way but remain focused and positive. There is absolutely no substitute for hard work, so that is a given. Never miss the forest for trees nor lose the last details so keep changing your ‘eye lens’ to zoom in and zoom out as both are critical to achieve your goal. Last advice do not take things personally what people say about you, neither get on high horse when they praise you nor lose your heart when they say bad things.