Nigerian Adesokan joins Zuckerberg’s league @ TR35

Dr. Yemi Adesokan

A Nigerian scientist, Dr. Yemi Adesokan, has joined the league of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook to make the Technology Review for young dynamic entrepreneurs under the age of 35, popularly known as TR35.
 

The 34 years old Adesokan, made the list of TR35 by creating an innovative way of using what experts tagged DNA sequencing technology for medical tests.

Adesokan, whose company Pathogenica Incorporated disclosed this through the Business Development Manager, Mr. Daniel Jackson at the weekend in a press statement made available to ITRealms Online.

He would be recognized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review’s TR35 listing of the world’s top young innovators for 2011 at a three-day conference scheduled for Cambridge, United States this week, which ends today, October 19, 2011.

The annual selection of global top innovators under the age of 35 began in 1999 by the editors of Technology Review to honor the young innovators whose inventions and research were found most exciting.

ITRealms Online gathered that today that collection of TR35 consist of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35; spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, among others, with past recipients including Danah Boyd, Microsoft (2010);    Sergey Brin, Google (2002); Helen Grenier, IS Robotics (1999); Jonathan Ive, Apple Computer (1999); Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (2007).

Adesokan got his honour for the work in the application of next generation sequencing to clinical diagnostics and was selected as a member of the TR35 class of 2011 by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, who evaluated more than 300 nominations.

He would join other TR35 honorees in discussing their achievements at the emtech MIT 2011 conference, taking place at the MIT Media Lab.

According to editor-in-chief and publisher of Technology Review, Jason Pontin, technology innovation is key to driving growth and progress in the areas of research, medicine, business and economics.

“This year’s group of TR35 recipients is driving the next wave of transformative technology and making an impact on the way we live, work and interact. We look forward to profiling and working with these technology leaders each year, and watching their continued advancement in their respective fields,” Pontin said.

Adesokan founded Pathogenica with genomics pioneer and Harvard professor George Church in 2009 in order to commercialize applications of pathogen sequencing.

Pathogenica’s test kits are able to identify the presence of many pathogen variants within a complex sample by reading their nucleic acid sequence, allowing for physicians to screen for multiple diseases with accurate results and a rapid turnaround.

Responding, Prof. Church said sequencing technologies have improved million-fold in the past seven years, bringing scientists a wealth of individual genomics solutions.

“The key now is to employ the data to improve clinical practice,” Church said, noting that the goals of the Personal Genome Project, BioweatherMap - a research project founded with Adesokan, and various pathogen genome sequencing efforts globally, have been to improve human welfare.

He pointed out that Pathogenica’s next generation sequencing tests are among the first tests that will leverage these to bring clear benefit to patients in the clinic, putting new tools for diagnosing and understanding diseases in the hands of front line physicians.

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