About SGRF

Sam Santhosh is an entrepreneur with a 35-year record of building successful companies. He spent his first 20 years in IT, where he founded California Software Co. Ltd (Calsoft) and took it public in India. Over the last 15 years he has led India's genomic revolution, incubating companies in next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics through SciGenom Labs in Kochi and San Francisco. These include MedGenome, which he built into India's leading genomic diagnostics and research company, raising $120 million from investors including Sequoia, Sofina, Leapfrog and IFC. Often called the "Genome Man of India", he was named in Goldman Sachs' list of the 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs in the world in 2019.

Sam founded SGRF in 2010 and continues to incubate companies in synthetic biology and AI at SciGenom Labs. His passion today is the 28-acre Hortus Malabaricus Botanical Garden in his home town of Thrissur. A mechanical engineer with an MBA from IIM Calcutta, he is the author of Sam's Twelve Commandments for the Indian Entrepreneur (2023).

Mrs M R Balamani Amma is a trustee of SGRF. A history teacher by profession, she taught for 28 years before joining the management team of the SciGenom group of laboratories in 2008.

She serves on the boards of SciGenom Labs, Feathersoft and Simisco Labs, and is active in social outreach in education and healthcare.

Dr Padmanabha Shenoy is a clinical immunologist and rheumatologist with more than 20 years of experience. He founded and leads RheumaCARE, India's first integrated platform combining clinical care, research and innovation in rheumatology. Before that he was Head of Rheumatology at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi, from 2009 to 2014.

He earned his MBBS from the University of Kerala in 2002 with 10 gold medals, his MD in internal medicine from JIPMER, Puducherry, in 2007, and his DM in clinical immunology and rheumatology from SGPGI, Lucknow, in 2011. In 2013 he became the first Indian to deliver a plenary lecture at the American College of Rheumatology, for his pioneering research in scleroderma.

Dr Sachdev Sidhu develops antibody therapeutics for cancer, infectious and chronic diseases. He is a Research Professor and Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Waterloo, and founder and CEO/CSO of the Centre for the Commercialization of Antibodies and Biologics (CCAB). Earlier, he spent 15 years as a professor at the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre and Department of Molecular Genetics, and 10 years as a scientist in Genentech's Department of Protein Engineering.

He has co-founded 10 start-ups in Canada, the US and India, including Saksin Lifesciences, ModMab Therapeutics and Northern Biologics; one of them was partly acquired by Gilead in 2020. His work has produced about 300 scientific publications and around 40 granted patents.

Prof. Dr Ajayan Sadanandan (MD, PhD, DPharm) comes from a family that practises the traditional Agastya Marma Shastra. His grandfather, Brahmasree O. Kesavan Nadar Swami, was the first head of the Marma department at the Ayurveda College, Thiruvananthapuram. He trained in the gurukula system under Shri Raghavan Vaidyar and Shri Karunakaran Vaidyar, and earned his BAMS and MD in Dravyaguna from SDM College of Ayurveda, Udupi, and a PhD in Dravyaguna from the National Institute of Ayurveda, Jaipur.

After 18 years of teaching Dravyaguna, he is Director of Amma Ayurveda Academy, Emeritus Professor and PhD guide at Glocal University, Saharanpur, and Visiting Professor at the Kerala University of Health Sciences. He has led ethnomedical surveys across the Western and Eastern Ghats, medicinal plant conservation and cultivation projects, and seed banks for several institutions. His awards include the Bhishak Prathibha award (2023) and the Vaidya Mahadevan Memorial Oshadhi Gnana Ratna award (2025).

Dr Ajikumar Parayil is the founder and CEO of Manus, The BioAlternatives Company, in Boston. Manus uses engineered microbes as cell factories to make natural molecules, such as stevia sweeteners, at industrial scale. The company grew out of his research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and its patented BioOptimization Cycle platform combines metabolic engineering, enzyme engineering and systems biology.

He was a postdoctoral associate and then research scientist at MIT from 2007 to 2012, where his work on engineering bacteria to produce a precursor of the cancer drug Taxol became a landmark in metabolic engineering. Before that he was a Singapore-MIT Alliance Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in chemistry from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, and co-founded Mirakel Technologies.

Dr George Thomas is a biochemist with more than three decades of experience in biotechnology and genomics. He was Chief Operating Officer of AgriGenome Labs, Kochi, from 2017 to 2024, and now works as an independent consultant, helping laboratories, companies and teaching institutions set up labs, develop research projects, turn them into products and organise international conferences.

Earlier he was Lab Chief at Interfield Laboratories (2003–2017) and Deputy Director of the SPIC Science Foundation (1989–2003), where his work in plant biotechnology included insect-resistant rice and tobacco. He studied at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and PGI, Chandigarh.

Dr N. Sasidharan is one of Kerala's leading plant taxonomists. He was a scientist at the Kerala Forest Research Institute in Peechi from 1977 to 2012, latterly as Programme Coordinator of its Forest Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation division. He was then an Emeritus Scientist of the Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment, and from 2018 to 2023 Deputy Regional Director of the National Medicinal Plants Board's Regional cum Facilitation Centre for the southern region.

His work spans systematic botany, forest ecology and non-wood forest products, including medicinal plants and the ethnobotany of forest-dwelling communities. He built a tree identification key for 650 forest trees of Kerala and a digital flora of more than 5,000 flowering plants, and was the original curator of HMBGRI's eFlora Keralam. He has described 26 species new to science, including seven trees, and published seven books and 115 scientific papers. He holds a PhD in botany from the University of Calicut and an International Diploma from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and has received the Dr V.V. Sivarajan Gold Medal of the Indian Association of Angiosperm Taxonomists and the Dr B.P. Pal Fellowship of the Ministry of Environment and Forests.

Dr Devi Santhosh is a Senior Scientist at Syndeio Biosciences in California, specialising in assay development, and was previously a scientist at Boost Neuroscience and ModMab Therapeutics.

She earned her PhD in genetics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she studied how blood vessels develop in the embryonic mouse brain, and a BA in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley. Her early career included work as a research associate at SciGenom in Kerala, testing patient samples for clinically actionable genetic variants, and in Genentech's next-generation sequencing core facility.