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-generationsequence assays and analytical pipelines developed at ClaretBio with a mainfocus on evaluating the utility of cell-free DNA fragmentation patterns incancer progression and treatment response monitoring. Before joiningClaretBio, she was a Research Scientist at Stanford University School ofMedicine in Prof Michael Snyder's lab. As a part of multiple consortia suchas the Integrative Personalized Omics Profiling Project, the HumanMicrobiome Project and the NASA Twins Study she has worked on longitudinalmultiomic analyses, focusing on applying transcriptomics and liquid biopsyapproaches to understand nuances of metabolic diseases, cancer, infectiousdisease and general health. She received her PhD in Molecular and CellularBiology from University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2012.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2026 Silicon Valley
Track Chair:
Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins University
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Klaus Pantel, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf / ELBS
• Daniel De Carvalho, University of Toronto
Keynote: Early Detection of Cancer by Multimodal Liquid Biopsy Analysis
• Klaus Pantel, UKE / ELBS
From Mutation to Methylation: The Next Wave of Liquid Biopsy Biomarkers
• Chair: Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins University
• Daniel De Carvalho, University of Toronto
• Manel Esteller, Sant Pau Research Institute
• Gordon Sanghera, Oxford Nanopore Technologies
Advancing Minimal Residual Disease Detection Through cfDNA & cfRNA Profiling
• Chair: Luis Diaz, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
• Anne-Renee Hartman, Adela
• Klaus Pantel, UKE / ELBS
AI-Informed Biomarker Trials: Turning Early Signals into Actionable Designs
• Chair: Manish Kohli, University of Utah
• Luis Diaz, MSKCC
• Eric Klein, GRAIL
• Peter Bach, DELFI Diagnostics
• Samuel Levy, ClearNote Health
Role of AI in Liquid Biopsies & Cancer Detection
• Chair: Amoolya Singh, DELFI Diagnostics
• Matthew Baker, Dxcover
• Pankaj Vats, NVIDIA
Fragmentomics for Early Detection
• Varsha Rao, Claret Bioscience
Integrating Genetic Risk with Early Detection
• Giordano Botta, Allelica
Metagenomic Diagnostics & Global Pathogen Surveillance
• Charles Chiu, UCSF
AI-Driven Host–Pathogen Signatures from Plasma cfDNA
• Sivan Bercovici, Karius
Ultra-Sensitive Multimodal Liquid Biopsy for Early Cancer Detection
• Atul Sharan, CellMax Life
AI-Enhanced Proteomic Signatures for Early Cancer Detection
• Diana Abdueva, Aqtual
