Dr Benedict Christopher Paul
Dr. Paul is an Assistant Professor of Biotechnology and a Biomedical Data Scientist specializing in the integration of computational biology with experimental research. He holds a PhD in Computational Biology from VIT University, Vellore, with a research focus on breast cancer and aromatase inhibitors. With a unique academic foundation spanning Medical Laboratory Technology (CMC Vellore) and Biotechnology, his work bridges the gap between clinical context and molecular analysis. Dr. Paul is a strong advocate for the Julia programming language in scientific application development, having developed jSeqTB, a machine-learning integrated GUI application for Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) data analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. His lab focuses on developing high-performance tools like juProt and exploring TNGS-based diagnostics, aiming to address complex biomedical challenges through data science.
Session
juTarget is a browser based Linux application for M. tuberculosis tNGS data analysis that applies a hybrid ML method for predicting drug resistance. Industry standard toolkit has been used to identify the variants compared against the WHO catalogue. Furthermore, the resistance profile for novel variants is predicted by Random Forest using a feature set of 30 biophysical properties of amino acids. Molecular Drug Susceptibility Report is generated which can be used as a clinical decision-making tool.