The daughter of a commercial airline pilot and the oldest of two kids, Gini Deshpande grew up in Mumbai and told her parents that by the time she was forty, she wanted to own her own car, house, and company. Check, check, and check.

After completing college and a competitive masters program in molecular biology in India, she turned down a full scholarship there in order to continue her studies in the United States, at Purdue specifically. Gini has pointed out that Purdue is in the heartland and thus an amusing place for a vegetarian to reside.

Gini figured out pretty quickly that she didn’t want to be an academic, and was especially interested in translation, a way of thinking that she says “didn’t resonate with the purist mindset” present in much of academia. She adds, “if you want to think about application, it’s considered a big no-no.”

A pivotal experience in the tech transfer office at Children’s Hospital in Boston helped launch her on a path towards entrepreneurship, ultimately leading to her role as Founder and CEO of NuMedii, which seeks to use multi-omics and artificial intelligence to drive drug discovery.

A high-profile biotech entrepreneur (a role that’s reflected even in her twitter handle: @biotechfounder), Gini has been a particularly impassioned champion of mentorship, for entrepreneurs in general, and for female entrepreneurs in particular.

We are delighted welcome Gini to Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to our sponsor, DNAnexus, for support of today’s show. DNAnexus is the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tags: biomed, david shaywitz, digital health, dnanexus, epatient, genomics, Gini Deshpande, health startup, health technology, human genome, lisa suennen, medical research, NuMedi, precision medicine, tech tonics, technology and health, venture valkyrie
 
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