Dhrithi Deshpande

Dhrithi Deshpande is currently pursuing her PhD in Pharmaceutical and Translational Sciences at USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore, India, where she conducted research on eco-toxicological studies, antimicrobial resistance patterns of coliform bacteria, and structural analysis of drug-resistant gene products for a novel bacteriophage-based therapy in lake water treatment.

During her Master’s in Molecular Pharmacology and Toxicology at USC, Dhrithi focused on studying the robustness and reproducibility of DNA-seq and RNA-seq tools used in biomedical research, working at the Mangul lab.

Additionally, she has worked as a Bioinformatics Research Associate for Xbiome, an AI-based microbiome drug development company, where she was involved in groundbreaking projects related to human microbiome-derived small molecule prediction platform. Her work included evaluating computational methods for predicting structural similarity, ADMET profiling, target prediction, pharmacokinetics of identified small molecules, and analyzing patterns and network structures in small molecules. She also contributed to the development of a pipeline for identifying secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters and their small molecule products from metagenomic data obtained from cancer patients, collaborating with interdisciplinary teams in the process.