Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is partnering with Indian Railways Finance Corporation (IRFC), a Navratna Public Sector Enterprise, to establish the Nation’s first ‘Single Cell Omics Translational (SCOT) Research Laboratory’.
This Research Laboratory, inaugurated on the campus today (17th Nov 2025), marks a pioneering step toward advancing India’s precision healthcare ecosystem. This initiative aims to bridge engineering and medicine for public health advancement.
Equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation, the SCOT Lab will facilitate early diagnosis, disease prognosis, biomarker discovery and drug screening across a spectrum of diseases — including cancer, cardiovascular, infectious, inflammatory, metabolic, and other non-communicable diseases.
IRFC is providing a CSR grant of ₹10.83 crore to establish this lab, which will be located in the Department of Medical Sciences and Technology (DMST) at IIT Madras. The facility is designed to accelerate research in single-cell biology, drug discovery, biomarker identification, and translational healthcare innovation.
Dignitaries grace launch ceremony
This sophisticated facility was launched in the presence of Prof V Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, Ms Usha Venugopal, Member (Finance), Ministry of Railways, Mr Manoj Kumar Dubey, Chairman and Managing Director, IRFC, Prof Ashwin Mahalingam, Dean (Alumni and Corporate Relations), IIT Madras, Prof Boby George, Head, DMST, IIT Madras, Prof Krishna Kumar, DMST, IIT Madras, Prof Anubama Rajan, who is coordinating this project from the DMST, and other stakeholders.
Railways Finance member sees hope for better health outcomes
Looking forward to high-impact outcomes from the lab, Ms Usha Venugopal, Member (Finance), Ministry of Railways, said, “The inauguration of the SCOT Research Lab is a welcome step toward building stronger capabilities in medical research. The support extended through IRFC’s CSR funding will aid studies that have the potential to improve early diagnosis and develop better therapies. This collaboration shows how institutions can work together for larger national goals. I am hopeful that the facility will contribute to knowledge, innovation, and better health outcomes in the years ahead.”
Expected outcomes from the new facility
The SCOT Lab will enable researchers to identify novel biomarkers for early disease detection and treatment response, as well as develop personalised therapeutic strategies through single-cell profiling for various diseases. Further, this lab will also aim to advance early detection and drug/vaccine discovery platforms and strengthen India’s precision medicine ecosystem by integrating molecular data with clinical insights.
The laboratory will serve as a national training hub for clinicians, scientists, and engineers, building India’s next generation of experts in single-cell transcriptomics, functional genomics, and translational medicine. It will also train medical and engineering students in advanced cell-based analytics and computational biology.
