Page 63 - Annual report 2021-22

Annual Report 2021-22 |

This decision unit focuses on generating translational healthcare solutions using computational
biology based tools, employing machine learning, AI, genome and clinical informatics. Some of the key
areas that are being investigated using genome informatics include, Mendelian genetic diseases,
genetic epidemiology of human diseases, pathogen genomics (SARS-CoV2), pharmacogenomics,
antimicrobial therapeutic strategies for MDR and XDR Mycobacterium tuberculosis and non-coding
RNA biology. Cardiovascular disease and cancer are being studied using multi-model big data. 46
Computational structural biology is being employed to study proteins involved in physiological
processes like autophagy that play an important role in multiple diseases. A new area of research that
has become a part of this decision unit is genome evolution using rotifers as a model.

Recent Progress:

● Covaxin-vaccinated people have been assessed for asymptomatic infections using machine
learning; 55.67% of the individuals have found to be immune after two doses of Covaxin.

● Proteogenomics global variant identification tool called PgxVar has been developed.

● Deep learning methods have been used to assess Intracranial Haemorrhage and Interstitial
Lung Diseases from brain and chest Computed Tomography scans, respectively.

● k-mer (short stretch of nucleotide sequences) based approach for SARS-CoV-2 genomic
surveillance has been developed.

● Structural models of LC3, which plays a key role in autophagy, that mimic physiologically
relevant LC3 structures on simplistic membranes have been created.

● Advanced computational infrastructure for human digital data collection, storage, and
analysis has been evaluated.

● KOMBAT- Knowledgebase of Microbe Battling Agents for Therapeutics has been developed.
● GenomeApp, which will help in disease prognosis of individuals whose genome sequencing
data is available, has been developed using informatics data generated from 1000 Indian
genomes sequenced under the IndiGen project.

● 510 SARS-CoV2 genomes sequenced as part of INGEN-COV2 have been analysed. 79 COVID-
19 positive mothers and their infants have been enrolled for a longitudinal study.
● Under the multi-institutional INSACOG consortium, new SARS-CoV2 variants have been
analysed and confirmed using 17,000 samples.

● Blood samples of 48 members across 29 families with idiopathic intellectual disabilities have
been collected.