Head Clinical Genomics Laboratory
Karkinos Advanced Cancer Care Diagnostics and Research, India
Dr. Prasanth Ariyannur is the head of the clinical genomics laboratory at Karkinos Advanced Cancer Diagnostics and Research (ACCDR) Laboratory at Kochi. He got his MBBS from Govt Medical College Thiruvananthapuram and MD in Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine from Amrita School of Medicine. He did post-graduate training at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS), Bethesda Maryland USA. His training was in molecular neurobiology on addiction physiology, neuronal energetics, and tryptophan-mediated immune tolerance in the US National Capital Consortium, the US National Institute of Health, and USUHS. He has identified and characterized the gene responsible for aspartyl N-acetyltransferase function in the brain and generated transgenic animal models for studying the biobehavioral effects in 2011. During the last decade, Dr. Prasanth has been establishing research projects to understand the genotype and phenotype correlation of many hereditary cancers such as Neurofibromatosis and other RASopathies, hereditary breast and ovarian cancers, and hereditary colon cancers. At Amrita Institute he established a diagnostic molecular oncology laboratory and has been actively involved in somatic mutation identification and constantly improving the genomic analysis methods in lung, breast, prostate, colon, thyroid, and endometrium cancers. He has developed many novel molecular biology-based laboratory tests at Amrita Institute which got national and international quality accreditations. At Karkinos Genomics Laboratory, his team has been conducting whole genome sequencing as well as many targeted panels for oral, colorectal cancers, lung, and breast cancers. He is instrumental in designing, implementing, validating, and establishing NGS-based custom-targeted gene panels. He is also focused on variant interpretations and classifications based on Indian data. He has many publications in international journals on basic and clinical science research, review articles, and book chapters. He is also a Principal Investigator of a project funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research.