Biography
Dr. Uma Devi Ranganathan is a scientist with a long standing dedication to tuberculosis (TB) research, having worked on TB vaccines, TB genomics and drug resistance. Having served as the head of the National Reference Laboratory for TB in India under the flagship of ICMR, she was instrumental in establishing the country's first NRL-based drug-resistant TB sequencing platform, complete with tailored bioinformatics pipelines and in developing the country’s first drug resistance Mutations catalogue building on the initial version by WHO’s global catalogue.
Key Impacts
A CRISPR-Cas13a-based molecular assay for rapid and accurate detection of M. tuberculosis
CRISPR-Cas13a assay demonstrates excellent sensitivity without compromising specificity for detecting M.tb in sputum and urine samples. The inclusion of multiplex targets significantly improved assay performance and warrants further validation in clinical settings. These findings highlight the potential of this platform as a promising, alternative diagnostic approach for TB, especially in low-resource environments.High sensitivity without compromising the specificity.
Source: Conference 2024