Curated from MIT Technology Review — Here’s what matters right now:
Sneha Goenka is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2025 Innovators Under 35. Meet the rest of this year’s honorees . Up to a quarter of children entering intensive care have undiagnosed genetic conditions. To be treated properly, they must first get diagnoses—which means having their genomes sequenced. This process typically takes up to seven weeks. Sadly, that’s often too slow to save a critically ill child. Hospitals may soon have a faster option, thanks to a groundbreaking system built in part by Sneha Goenka , an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton—and MIT Technology Review ’s 2025 Innovator of the Year. Five years ago, Goenka and her colleagues designed a rapid-sequencing pipeline that can provide a genetic diagnosis in less than eight hours. Goenka’s software computations and hardware architectures were critical to speeding up each stage of the process. “Her work made everyone realize that genome sequencing is not only for research and medical application in the future but can have immediate impact on patient care,” says Jeroen de Ridder , a professor at UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands, who has developed an ultrafast sequencing tool for cancer diagnosis. Now, as cofounder and scientific lead of a new company, she is working to make that technology widely available to patients around the world. Goenka grew up in Mumbai, India. Her mother was an advocate for women’s education, but as a child, Goenka had to fight to persuade other family members to let her continue her studies. She moved away from home at 15 to attend her final two years of school and enroll in a premier test-preparation academy in Kota, Rajasthan. Thanks to that education, she passed what she describes as “one of the most competitive exams in the world,” to get into the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Once admitted to a combined bachelor’s and master’s program in electrical engineering, she found that “it was a real boys’ club.” But Goenka excelled in developing computer architecture systems that accelerate computation. As an undergraduate, she began applying those skills to medicine, driven by her desire to “have real-world impact”—in part because she had seen her family struggle with painful uncertainty after her brother was born prematurely when she was eight years old. While working on a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford, she turned her focus to evolutionary and clinical genomics. One day a senior colleague, Euan Ashley , presented her with a problem. He said, “We want to see how fast we can make a genetic diagnosis. If you had unlimited funds and resources, just how fast do you think you could make the compute?” Streaming DNA A genetic diagnosis starts with a blood sample, which is prepped to extract the DNA—a process that takes about three hours. Next that DNA needs to be “read.” One of the world’s leading long-read sequencing technologies, developed by Oxford Nanopore Technologies
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Original reporting: MIT Technology Review