Pune: Touching upon the three pillars of science, viz, mathematics, biology, and medicine, Anurag Agarwal, Director of Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi in his lecture gave an insight into the next 100 years in medicine.
He was delivering a lecture in the city at National Centre for Cell Science on Friday. Agarwal, who is a pulmonologist, with the help of big data and data analysis showed how medicines are likely to be prescribed to patients in coming future.
Agarwal said, “The machine analysis of patients will help in giving personalised medicine and we can reduce use of steroids. However, the limitations of data quality is that we Indians misspell a number of words or can have incomplete data. Symptomatic diagnosis and manpower crunch is there for ages, though we have developed the telemedicine branch which would help doctors and patients from remote areas. Similarly, data connectivity is limited.”
His focus area is unraveling the common threads of metabolic dysfunction and cellular stress response pathways that link the concurrent epidemics of obesity, asthma and diabetes and also use of information technology and big data analytics for effective application of community health efforts and development of pattern-based diagnostics.
His lab has identified the critical role of mitochondrial dysfunction in the pathogenesis of asthma and discovered the mechanisms by which mesenchymal stem cells donate mitochondria to dysfunctional airway epithelium, attenuating experimental asthma.
His group has developed integrated solutions for healthcare delivery and digital data collection in resource-limited settings as well as computational tools for visualisation and analysis of complex datasets.
Replying to a question after the lecture, he said though asthma is a genetic disease, the maternal side is a little on the upper side.
