13th IBSE Seminar by Dr. Anshu Bhardwaj

IBSE is very pleased to introduce you all to our guest speaker Dr. Anshu Bhardwaj who gave IBSE Seminar on Tuesday, 11th February 2020 in BT Seminar Hall (Biotechnology Dept. Block 1, Ground Floor), at 03:30 pm. The title of her presentation was: “Data-driven approaches to address Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)”.

Anshu Bhardwaj obtained her Ph.D. in understanding genotype-to-phenotype correlations in human mitochondrial diseases. She then joined CSIR as one of the founding PIs of the Open Source Drug Discovery Project in 2008. She conceived, designed and implemented crowdsourcing as a tool to tackle challenging scientific problems (Connect to Decode project), which is considered as a futuristic approach to drive biomedical big data projects and lead to human resource development in frontier areas of data science and analytics. She has over 30 publications to her credit and has trained over 1000 young students. She served as an Associate scientific advisor to Science Translational Medicine and is on the Editorial board of Frontiers in Systems Biology and Journal of Genetics. She was one of the four Young Innovators in India, United National Development Program (UNDP), selected for the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program by US State Department, awarded Newton-Bhabha Fund from the British Council and the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK. Currently, she is working as the first female Long-term CRI fellow, Paris, France. Her passion is biomedical big data analytics with focus on understanding infection and rare disease biology towards better therapeutics. She has conducted several workshops, has been invited to deliver over 150 talks at national and international platforms. (https://www.imtech.res.in/contact/staff/dr-anshu-bhardwaj/107)

Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the phenomenon of clinically relevant pathogens developing multi-drug resistance (particularly to antibiotics), has emerged as a grave threat to public health that could plunge the world into a ‘post-antibiotic era’. The Global Action Plan for AMR (GAP-AMR) has identified five objectives to address this scourge. The first two objectives are “ (a) Improve awareness and understanding of antimicrobial resistance through effective communication, education and training and (b) Strengthen the knowledge and evidence base through surveillance and research”. The AB-OpenLab is focussing their research efforts in these verticals of the GAP-AMR. For the first objective, we have developed a game on antimicrobial resistance which will have a AI bot integrated into the gaming environment as a guide for the players to interact and learn concepts of AMR at their own pace. We will showcase the first version of our game during the talk. In the second objective, we are developing a data analysis platform to understand the drug resistance determinants in priority pathogens and also developing new methods to identify novel therapeutic interventions. The talk will discuss some of the recent results on identification of novel chemotypes of mycobacteria and previous experiments on utilizing crowdsourcing for generating resources in drug discovery of mycobacteria and development of platforms for data analysis.