Last updated on March 2nd, 2024 at 10:17 pm
Three years after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, communities from all nations still grapple with the virus’s deadly impacts. While pharmaceutical companies continue to develop and manufacture drugs that can dampen the worse effects of the infection, many impacted by “Covid-19” develop a severe disease that threatens long-term well-being. A small but significant percentage of infected persons will die because of organ failure associated with severe disease.
For Ph.D. student Sahil Sethi, biomedical informatics is key to learning about SARS-CoV-2’s elegant design and mitigating the damage it can unleash on the human body. The American Medical Informatics Association notes that biomedical informatics “applies theories and processes to help generate, store, retrieve, use and share biomedical data by advancing computing, communication and information science as it applies to biomedicine.” Informatics uses elegant technologies and scientific processes to connect clinical research with real-world challenges. The end of biomedical informatics is to improve health and quality of life.
Sahil Sethi remains convinced that “Big Data” can help humanity win the war against Covid-19. Sethi is particularly interested in working with others in the scientific community to solve the organ failure component of severe SARS-CoV-2. Severe Covid-19 can unleash catastrophic damage on the brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, and other organs, leading to cascading systems failures. When coupled with comorbidities, the virus can be deadly.
Working with a cadre of like-minded researchers, Sethi explores data outputs associated with organ damage and failure, applying machine learning (ML) to discern how the processes involved in the interplay of SARS-CoV-2 and comorbidities give rise to organ damage and failure. Sethi believes that the “informatics” gleaned from the deep dive into data can help researchers develop therapies and medicines that pause or reverse organ damage.
Before beginning his Ph.D. studies at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Sethi spent over five years conducting research in bioinformatics. Highly proficient in cell biology, working with medical data (especially viral data), and doing predictive analysis using machine learning and deep learning techniques, Sethi is a member of a small but growing cohort of bioinformatics researchers with the skills and experience needed to connect the dots between big data and big, contextual problems. As a graduate research assistant at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Sethi has conducted extensive studies on the efficacy and accuracy of the at-home covid test kit, research he hopes will provide consumers with peace of mind as they navigate a world under the shadow of Covid-19.
SARS-CoV-2 is probably here to stay. Sahil Sethi and his fellow researchers believe biomedical informatics will help us all “live with” the virus.
