2025 Innovator of the Year: Sneha Goenka for developing an ultra-fast sequencing technology

Sneha Goenka is one of the 2025 innovators of with Technology Review under the age of 35. Meet the rest of this year's award winner. The genetic conditions have not diagnosed up to a quarter of the children who enter the intensive care unit. In order to be treated correctly, you must first receive diagnoses - which means that your genomes are sequenced. This process usually takes up to seven weeks. Unfortunately, this is often too slow for a critically ill child. Hospitals may soon have a faster option, thanks to a groundbreaking system, which was partly built by Sneha Goenka, an assistant professor for electrical and computer technology at Princeton, and the 2025 innovator of 2025 by with Technology Review. Five years ago, Goenka and her colleagues developed a quick sequencing pipeline that can provide a genetic diagnosis in less than eight hours. The software calculations and hardware architectures by Goenka were crucial to accelerate every phase of the process. "In their work, everyone recognizes that genom sequence is not only in the future for research and medical application, but can also have immediate effects on patient care," says Jeroen de Ridder, professor at UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands, who has developed an ultra -fast sequencing tool for cancer diagnosis. As a co -founder and scientific execution of a new company, she is now working to largely provide this technology patients around the world. Goenka grew up in Mumbai, India. Her mother was an advocate of the training of women, but as a child Goenka had to fight to convince other family members to continue their studies. She moved away from home at 15 to visit her last two school years and registered for a leading test preparation academy in Kota, Rajasthan. Thanks to this training, she existed what she described as "one of the most competitive exams in the world" in order to enter the Indian Institute for Technology Mombay. After she was approved by a combined Bachelor and Master program for electrical engineering, she found that it was "a real boy club". However, Goenka was excellent in the development of computer architecture systems that accelerate the calculation. As a student, she began to apply these skills to medicine, driven by her desire to "have effective effects on the real world", because she had seen her family fought with painful uncertainty after her brother was born prematurely at the age of eight. When she worked on a doctorate in electrical engineering in Stanford, she concentrated on evolutionary and clinical genomics. One day an older colleague Euan Ashley presented her a problem. He said: "We want to see how quickly we can make a genetic diagnosis. If you had unlimited remedies and resources, how quickly could you make it?" Streaming DNA A genetic diagnosis begins with a blood sample that is prepared to extract the DNA - a process that takes about three hours. Next, this DNA must be "read". One of the world's leading long -lasting sequencing technologies developed by Oxford Nanopore Technologies can generate detailed raw data of the genetic code of a person in about an hour and a half. Unfortunately, the processing of all this data to identify mutations can take another 21 hours. Shipping samples in a central laboratory and find out which mutations are of interest often leads to the process extends to weeks. Goenka saw a better way: Create a real-time system that "stream" the sequencing data and analyzed it as it was generated, e.g. B. Streaming of a film on Netflix instead of downloading it to look at it later. For this purpose, she designed a cloud computing architecture to achieve more processing performance. Goenka's first challenge was to increase the speed at which your team was able to upload the raw data for the processing by stopping the requirements between the sequencer and the cloud in order to avoid unnecessary "chatter". She developed the exact number of the required communication channels - and created algorithms with which these channels could be reused in an efficient way. The next challenge was "basic call" - the raw signal of the sequencing machine into the nucleotide bases A, C, T and G, the language that our DNA is. Instead of using a central node to orchestrate this process, which is an inefficient, troubleshooting approach, Goenka wrote software in order to automatically assign dedicated nodes in the cloud of data streams directly from the sequencer. Meet the rest of this year's innovators under the age of 35. In order to identify mutations, the sequences were aligned for comparison with a reference genome. It encoded a custom program that triggers alignment as soon as the basic calls for a stack of sequences have ended and at the same time initiated the basic calls for the next stack and ensured that the calculation resources of the system are used efficiently. Add all of these improvements together, and the approach from Goenka reduced the total time required to analyze a genome for mutations from about 20 hours to 1.5 hours. Finally, the team worked with genetic consultants and doctors to create a filter who identified what mutations for the health of a person were most critical, and this set then received a final manual curation from a genetic specialist. These last phases last up to three hours. The technology was about to be fully functional when the first patient suddenly arrived. A critical test when the 13-year-old Matthew was flown to Stanford's children's hospital in 2021, he fought to breathe and failed his heart. The doctors had to know whether the inflammation in his heart was due to a virus or a genetic mutation that requires a transplant. His blood was pulled on a Thursday. The transplant committee made its decisions on Fridays. "It meant that we had a small time window," says Goenka. Goenka was in Mumbai when sequencing began. She stayed awake all night and monitored the calculations. At this point in time when the project was no longer about doing it, she says: "It was about how quickly we can achieve this result in the life of this person?" Three weeks later he received a new heart. "He's fine now," says Goenka. So far, Goenka's technology has been tested at 26 patients, including Matthew. Her pipeline affects "medical care for newborns in the Stanford intensive care units directly," says Ashley. Now she is striving for even broader effects - Goenka and her colleagues lay the basis for a startup, which they hope that they will launch the technology and make sure that they reach as many patients as possible. In the meantime, she has refined the computer pipeline and reduced the time to the diagnosis to about six hours. The demand is clear, she says: "In an incoming study in which more than a dozen laboratory directors and neonatologists are involved, every person surveyed emphasized. A director said it briefly and flush:" I need this platform today, especially yesterday. "Goenka also develops software to make the technology more inclusive. The reference genome is displaced towards people of European descent. The human pangenome project is international cooperation to create reference genoma from a wide variety of population groups that Goenka wants to use to personalize the filters of your team, to mark mutations that may include a patient, which may include a patient Current their training and career has become better since their work.