Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs

Biography

Dr. Harsha Rajasimha has over 15 years of experience and widely recognized in the field of Genomics, systems biology data integration standards, BigData analytics, data enabled life sciences, and precision medicine for cancer and rare disease diagnosis. Dr. Rajasimha is currently global head of life sciences R&D for NTT DATA Services (formerly Dell Services). He co-directs the center for metabolic and rare diseases at George Mason University. Earlier, he led the global strategy and business development for Strand Life Sciences, a CAP/CLIA laboratory and Bioinformatics powerhouse and precision medicine diagnostics company, between 2013 and 2016. Dr. Rajasimha founded Jeeva Informatics Solutions (www.Jeevadx.com) in 2013, a cloud based genomic data informatics Company that received the ‘Bioscience Company of the Year 2014’ award from Montgomery County, MD. He is co-founder and board member of the non-profit organization for rare diseases India (www.ordindia.org) and established mechanisms to accelerate rare disease diagnosis, public health policies and accessibility of treatments for patients in India. Dr. Rajasimha has led the development of some of the largest genomics projects including PathogenPortal, Pathosystems resource integration center, Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), LIMS implementation at the FDA Office of Regulatory Affairs, architected Genome Explorer® a web-based platform for next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis for Genome International Corporation and Cyberinfrastructure development for National Eye Institute's genomics program. His contributions to the NGS program were recognized by NEI director’s innovation award in 2012. Dr. Rajasimha has authored over 15 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, inventor on patents and is often invited speaker at international conferences and executive consultant/advisor to a number of biotech startups. He has contributed to global data standards initiatives such as BioPAX, DELSAGlobal, personalized medicine coalition, and the global alliance for genomics and health. He earned baccalaureate degree in computer science engineering from Bangalore University, Masters in Computer Science & Bioinformatics and Doctoral degree in interdisciplinary program genetics, bioinformatics and computational biology from Virginia Tech.

Research Interest

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