The Business of Science : The First Decade of Strand

As a doctoral student in decision sciences, I wandered into a classroom at MIT where S.E. Luria was teaching an introductory biology class to engineers. I sat in the back and caught the last few minutes of the class. It was fascinating enough that I remembered the next time I was in the Harvard/MIT Coop and picked up a copy of his "36 Lectures in Biology" and browsed in it from time to time. This was in 1970s and I didn't seriously consider working in the life sciences till the mid-90s when students in biophysics at IISc showed up in my computational geometry class wanting to learn about algorithms for
Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay tessellations to be able to study the geometry of macromolecules.

One thing led to another and four of us professors from the CSA department at IISc set up Strand Genomics in November 2000. It was heralded and jeered as a watershed event - the first time that professors at a public university in India had promoted a company with the university taking an equity stake.

Strand has survived its first decade and is still far from being a blockbuster biotech company but today has about 150 employees (70 computer scientists and 55 life scientists), is sustainable and has at least one global, market leading product in GeneSpring. I will describe the Strand journey so far while emphasizing the joys of
pursuing a truly inter-disciplinary scientific agenda, building a collegial company, and learning what it takes to create a science driven innovation.

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About Speaker :
Vijay Chandru is an alumnus of BITS Pilani where he trained in
Electrical Engineering and went on to get a doctorate from MIT,
Cambridge in 1982. Chandru is an academic and an entrepreneur who was
named in the 50 Pioneers of Change by India Today in 2008. His
academic career in mathematical sciences has spanned three decades as
a research scientist and professor at Purdue University and Indian
Institute of Science, with visiting appointments at IBM's TJ Watson
Center, UPenn, Stanford and at MIT. He is a fellow of the Indian
academies of science and engineering. As an inventor and co-founder of
the open source handheld Simputer Project, and the leading
computational biology company Strand Life Sciences, Chandru has been
recognized as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. He
currently serves as Chairman & CEO of Strand LS www.strandls.com and
as the honorary president of ABLE www.ableindia.org (the apex body of
Indian biotechnology industry) for a 3-year term 2009-2012. He holds
an adjunct faculty appointment at ICTS (TIFR) Bangalore.