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
• Pioneer Honoree: Klaus Pantel, UKE & ELBS
• Luminary: Rebecca Fitzgerald, University of Cambridge
Keynote
• Klaus Pantel, UKE & ELBS
Advancing Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) Detection through cfDNA and cfRNA Profiling
• Chair: Luis Diaz, MSKCC
• Anne-Renee Hartman, Adela
Early Cancer Detection / Regulatory / Population Health
• Peter Bach, DELFI Diagnostics
• Joshua J. Ofman, GRAIL
Role of AI in Liquid Biopsies and Cancer Detection
• Chair: Amoolya Singh, DELFI Diagnostics
