Speaker Profile
Ph.D., VP of Clinical Affairs and Partnerships, Claret Bioscience
Biography
Dr. Varsha Rao is the VP of Partnerships and Clinical Affairs at ClaretBio. She oversees the clinical applications of the novel next-generation sequence assays and analytical pipelines developed at ClaretBio with a main focus on evaluating the utility of cell-free DNA fragmentation patterns in cancer progression and treatment response monitoring. Before joining ClaretBio, she was a Research Scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine in Prof Michael Snyder's lab. As a part of multiple consortia such as the Integrative Personalized Omics Profiling Project, the Human Microbiome Project and the NASA Twins Study she has worked on longitudinal multiomic analyses, focusing on applying transcriptomics and liquid biopsy approaches to understand nuances of metabolic diseases, cancer, infectious disease and general health. She received her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2012.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2026 Silicon Valley
Track Chair:
Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Klaus Pantel, UKE & ELBS
• Daniel De Carvalho, University of Toronto
Keynote
• Klaus Pantel, UKE & ELBS
From Mutation to Methylation: The Next Wave of Liquid Biopsy Biomarkers
• Chair: Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins
• Daniel De Carvalho, University of Toronto
• Manel Esteller, Sant Pau Research Institute
Advancing Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) Detection through cfDNA and cfRNA Profiling
• Chair: Luis Diaz, MSKCC
• Anne-Renee Hartman, Adela
• Klaus Pantel, UKE & ELBS
AI-Informed Biomarker Trials: Turning Early Detection Signals into Clinically Actionable Designs
• Chair: Manish Kohli, University of Utah
• Luis Diaz, MSKCC
• Amoolya Singh, DELFI Diagnostics
• Peter Bach, DELFI Diagnostics
Fragmentomics for Early Detection: End Motifs and Library Prep
• Varsha Rao, Claret Bioscience
Integrating Genetic Risk with Early Detection: A Precision Prevention Framework for Cardiovascular Disease
• Giordano Botta, Allelica
Role of AI in Liquid Biopsies and Cancer Detection
• Chair: Amoolya Singh, DELFI Diagnostics
• Matthew Baker, Dxcover
