Dr. Santosh Kumar

Santosh is the founder and CTO of In2Cell Biosciences, where he is building POLEX, a platform that reads a drug's impact directly on the tumour genome. His work sits at the meeting point of cancer biology, DNA damage, and machine learning.

His research has centred on a single question: why does a drug work in one tumour and fail in another? During his PhD he studied how cancer cells evolve resistance to chemotherapy, showing how tumours acquire topoisomerase-guided mutations that let them dodge the DNA damage a drug is meant to cause. That work, on the mechanics of drug response and escape, is the foundation POLEX is built on.

He brings more than eight years of research across cancer biology, genome stability, and long-read sequencing, including four years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. Earlier, he developed monoclonal antibodies in industry, contributing to several granted patents.