Bharat Thyagarajan's Biography

Bharat Thyagarajan, Director- Division of Molecular Pathology and Genomics & Molecular Diagnostics Clinical Laboratory (MDL), University of Minnesota

Dr. Bharat Thyagarajan is director of the Molecular Diagnostics Clinical Laboratory (MDL), director of the Division of Molecular Pathology and Genomics, and a faculty investigator in the Advanced Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (ARDL). The MDL processes some 25,000 specimens annually related to inherited and infectious diseases, bone marrow engraftment, and blood and solid tumor malignancies. Dr Thyagarajan and his MDL colleagues are implementing next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) for diagnosing genetic disease.

The MDL has the capacity to test some 5,000 genes implicated in monogenic disorders with the goal of testing all the genes in the human genome (>20,000) and has implemented DNA sequence-based tumor diagnostics. MDL clinicians have issued hundreds of patient molecular pathology reports based on individual genetic tests and expect that pace of reporting to increase as NGS technology is mainstreamed into clinical medicine. Thyagarajan’s team collaborates in this effort with the University of Minnesota Genomics Center, which produces the raw sequence from DNA extracted from clinical samples, and the bioinformatics group at the Minnesota Supercomputing Center, which puts the raw sequence data in a readable format from which clinicians can interpret the diagnostic and prognostic value of genetic variants.

At ARDL, Dr. Thyagarajan is principal laboratory investigator for the Hispanic Community Health Study, an NIH-funded multicenter epidemiologic study of Hispanic/Latino populations, and the NIH-funded Long Life Family Study, an international collaborative study of the genetics and familial components of exceptional survival, longevity, and healthy aging. Thyagarajan’s personal research program focuses on the role of mitochondria in breast and colorectal cancer.