The winners of the maiden edition of the Genomic Pioneer Awards (GPA) were announced at the HUGO?s 13th International Meeting on the Human Genome on September 30, 2008. The Genomic Pioneers Award winners are Dr. Sylvie Chauvaux, Asst Professor, Institut Pasteur, Paris for Europe; Dr. Srikanta Kumar Rath, Scientist, Genotoxicity Laboratory, Central Drug Research Institute for India; and Dr. Juergen Pipper, Senior Scientist, Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, Singapore for the Asia-Pacific region.

Anu Acharya, CEO, Ocimum Biosolutions, says ?The Genomic Pioneer initiative is a part of our strong corporate social responsibility program through which we reach out to our community. This initiative aims at empowerment at grassroots level to foster improved Industry-Industry & Academia-Industry collaboration to support global biotech pursuit for bringing improved, affordable healthcare and therapeutics.?

?Microarrays have been instrumental for genome-wide association studies and clinical biomarker discovery programs. Genomic Pioneer Award is an effort to promote research in the use of cutting-edge technologies that speed up such discovery programs.” says Ashwin Sivakumar, Ph.D, Director Marketing & Alliances, Ocimum Biosolutions.

Dr.Sylvie Chauvaux, winner of the Genomic Pioneer Award for Europe region, says,?It is truly a great honor for me to receive the Genomic Pioneer Award. This is a welcome award and I sincerely appreciate it, especially for my work on the transcriptome analysis of Yersinia pestis, the agent of plague, when grown in human plasma. This study provided evidence that many of the genes associated with virulence in animal models of plague were regulated in a similar manner in human plasma.?

Dr.Srikanta Kumar Rath, the GPA winner for India, stated that he was very happy on winning this award and also said that he along with his team would persist in their efforts in toxicogenomic studies to enable discovery of potent and safer drugs.

“It is an honor to receive the Genomic Pioneer Award. Our line of work is multidisciplinary in nature and I would like to share this recognition with all the people who have contributed to this project over the last couple of years. Prizes like the Genomic Pioneer Award will further encourage young scientists to make an impact in the Genomics field,” says Dr.Juergen Pipper, the recipient of Genomic Pioneer Award for Asia-Pacific region.