Proceedings of the Conference on Bioengineering for Global Health (SYMRESEARCH 2.0 2025)
Conference on Bioengineering for Global Health (SYMRESEARCH 2.0 2025)
📍Pune, India🗓️ 18-20 September 2025
Conference: Conference on Bioengineering for Global Health (SYMRESEARCH 2.0 2025)
Date: 18-20 September 2025
Location: Pune, India (Offline)
Website: https://symresearch.siu.edu.in/ Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Lavale, Pune, India, has long stood as a confluence of disciplines, cultures and ideas, guided by the timeless Sanskrit precept "वसुधैव कुटुंबकम्" — The World is One Family. It was in the true spirit of this philosophy that the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences (FoMHS) and the Faculty of Engineering (FoE) came together to jointly conceive and organize SYMRESEARCH 2.0: Bioengineering for Global Health, an international conference held from 18 to 20 September 2025 at the Lavale, Pune campus. What began as an ambitious idea to bring biology and engineering into deliberate conversation with one another has, through the collective effort of patrons, mentors, organizers, reviewers and participants from across the world, matured into a substantial body of peer-reviewed scholarship. This proceedings volume is the tangible outcome of that endeavour. The conference theme, "Bioengineering for Global Health," and its accompanying call to action, "Re-engineering Health, Re-defining Health, Empowering Lives," were chosen deliberately. They signal a conviction that the health challenges confronting the world today — genetic and rare disorders, infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance, nutritional deficiencies, non-communicable and chronic diseases, ageing populations, climate-induced illness and widening healthcare disparities — cannot be resolved within the boundaries of a single discipline. They demand the deliberate fusion of biological insight with engineering ingenuity, of clinical experience with computational power, and of local knowledge with global collaboration. SYMRESEARCH 2.0 was designed as precisely such a meeting ground: a platform where scientists, clinicians, engineers, regulators, industry leaders, policymakers and students could gather not merely to present findings, but to identify research gaps and seed long-term collaborations capable of outlasting the three days of the conference itself. Health challenges rarely announce themselves in a form that fits neatly within a single department or a single discipline. A rise in antimicrobial-resistant infection is at once a microbiological problem, a diagnostics problem, a policy problem and, increasingly, a data problem. A delay in cancer diagnosis in a rural clinic is at once a biomedical-imaging problem, an infrastructure problem, and an artificial-intelligence (AI) problem waiting to be solved through affordable, deployable tools. SYMRESEARCH 2.0 was built on the premise that real solutions to such real problems are found not at the centre of any one field, but at the edges where it touches another. This is why the conference deliberately brought engineers into conversation with clinicians, computational scientists with microbiologists and policy specialists with bioinformaticians, so that the research presented here would be shaped, from its inception, by the practical constraints and possibilities of implementation and not only by theoretical elegance. This orientation is not incidental to Symbiosis's institutional identity; it is central to it. The University's motto finds contemporary expression in the national and global vision of "One Earth, One Family, One Future," and the organizers were conscious throughout of aligning the conference's scientific agenda with this larger purpose. Fittingly, the themes explored across SYMRESEARCH 2.0 collectively support twelve of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), spanning good health and well-being, clean water and sanitation, industry innovation, reduced inequalities, climate action, life below water and on land, and partnerships for the goals. Every paper in this volume, whatever its specific technical contribution, can therefore also be read as a contribution to this broader and shared human project. The scale and diversity of participation in SYMRESEARCH 2.0 bore out this global ambition. Over the course of three days, the conference drew close to 600 participants, including the delegates from France, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Nepal to join researchers and students from across India. This breadth of participation was not incidental; it reflected the versatility of the conference's scientific agenda and its ability to speak, simultaneously, to a molecular biologist in one country, a public health engineer in another, and a clinical AI researcher in a third. That an audience drawn from such varied academic, cultural and geographic backgrounds could find common cause in these five tracks is itself evidence that the health challenges at the heart of this conference are, in the truest sense, global, and that the solutions emerging from Bioengineering for Global Health must be built with an equally worldwide community of contributors. To translate this vision into a coherent scientific programme, the conference was structured around five thematic tracks, each addressing a distinct but interconnected dimension of bioengineering's promise for global health. The first track on Personalized Medicine engaged with one of the most consequential paradigms shifts in contemporary healthcare: the movement away from a "one-size-fits-all" model of treatment towards therapies calibrated to an individual's unique genetic, molecular and physiological profile. Advances in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, coupled with the analytical power of computational biology, are making such individualization possible at a scale unimaginable a generation ago. Contributions in this track examined pharmacogenomics, gene-editing technologies including CRISPR, CAR-T cell therapy, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, stem-cell-based interventions, nanomedicine, theranostics, immune engineering, and the thoughtful integration of traditional systems of medicine, including AYUSH, with evidence-based precision care. Taken together, these papers illustrate how personalization is steadily becoming not an aspiration but an operational reality of clinical practice. The second track focused on Microbial Research. It confronted a set of challenges that sit at the intersection of basic science and urgent public health need. On one hand, the deliberate engineering of microbial systems and the human microbiome holds real promise for preventing and treating infectious, inflammatory, nutritional and metabolic diseases. On the other, the escalating global threat of antimicrobial resistance continues to erode the effectiveness of existing therapeutics, demanding sharper tools for surveillance, diagnostics, vaccine development and antimicrobial stewardship. The papers gathered in this track span microbiome engineering, vaccine research, pathogen biology and novel antimicrobial strategies, reflecting a shared recognition that pandemic preparedness and everyday infectious-disease management are two faces of the same scientific problem. Biomedical Imaging, the third track, traced the rapid evolution of diagnostic technology from a purely observational tool into an active platform for disease prediction, treatment planning, precision intervention and longitudinal monitoring. The contributions in this section range across neuroimaging, musculoskeletal and cellular imaging, animal imaging, advanced acquisition techniques and computational image analysis, with a recurring emphasis on the integration of artificial intelligence into imaging workflows. This convergence of imaging science and machine learning is opening possibilities for earlier diagnosis and more confident clinical decision-making that were simply unavailable to previous generations of clinicians. Environmental Engineering for Public Health, the fourth track, took up the increasingly undeniable proposition that human health cannot be separated from the health of the environments in which people live. Climate change, air and water pollution, the management of healthcare and biomedical waste, food security, the emergence of new pathogens and rapid urbanization together constitute an interlinked set of pressures on public health systems, particularly in vulnerable and resource-constrained settings. The research presented here addresses sustainable healthcare waste management, climate-resilient public health infrastructure, environmental surveillance, food and nutrition security and policy interventions designed to protect the populations most exposed to these compounding risks. These contributions reaffirm a simple but easily forgotten truth: healthy societies require healthy ecosystems and engineering solutions that ignore this relationship will always be incomplete. The fifth and final track on Applied Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare, examined what is arguably the fastest-moving frontier in contemporary medicine. Machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, the Internet of Medical Things, blockchain-enabled health systems and multimodal AI are being applied across the entire continuum of care — from disease prediction and diagnostic imaging to clinical decision support, drug discovery, robotic surgery, telemedicine, wearable monitoring and personalized treatment planning. The papers in this track illustrate both the technical sophistication of these tools and a welcome and necessary caution about their responsible deployment, underscoring that intelligent systems are most valuable when they augment, rather than replace, clinical judgement. Complementing these five tracks, the conference opened with a day of pre-conference workshops that gave delegates hands-on exposure to techniques underpinning much of the research that followed. Sessions on stem cell biology, nanoscience and nanotechnology for healthcare, energy and environmental applications, quantitative magnetic resonance imaging, and technology-enabled healthcare gave early-career researchers and students a practical grounding before the scientific sessions began, reinforcing the conference's conviction that skill-building and knowledge-sharing must go hand in hand. The scholarly rigour behind these five tracks did not emerge by accident; it was built into the conference process from its earliest stages. SYMRESEARCH 2.0 invited structured abstracts from researchers/academicians and students across these five themes. A total of 153 abstracts were received. Following careful screening and review, a substantial number of abstracts were selected for poster and oral presentation at the conference itself, allowing early-stage and ongoing work to be shared and discussed directly with peers. Then after, authors who presented their papers in conference were invited to submit their full papers. While many papers were submitted, only 46 manuscripts were subjected to a rigorous double blind peer review, with every submission evaluated independently by two subject-matter experts drawn from the relevant field. Reviewers assessed manuscripts against established criteria of scientific soundness, methodological rigour, originality, clarity and relevance to the conference themes, and were also asked to flag any concerns regarding research and publication ethics. After peer review process, only 28 papers were finally selected for inclusion in this proceedings volume, to be published with Atlantis Press. This process was deliberately conservative rather than expansive. The Editorial Board took the view that a proceedings volume earns its value not by the number of papers it contains but by the confidence readers can place in each one. Every accepted paper in this volume has therefore passed through independent expert review, a mandatory revision cycle and a final integrity check consistent with Atlantis Press's publication policies on originality, plagiarism, authorship and conflicts of interest. We believe this discipline, though it inevitably meant that many worthy submissions could not ultimately be included, was essential to producing a volume that the scientific community can trust and build upon. The Editorial Board wishes to record its deep gratitude to the authors whose original research constitutes the substance of this volume, and whose willingness to engage constructively with reviewer feedback materially improved the quality of their contributions. We are equally grateful to the keynote speakers, invited experts, session chairs, peer reviewers, members of the scientific and organizing committees, student volunteers, and the institutional leadership of Symbiosis International (Deemed University), whose collective diligence made both the conference and this publication possible. Particular thanks to Prof. Anuradha Vaidya, the organizing secretary of SYMRESEARCH 2.0, whose enthusiastic leadership and commitment ensured that every aspect of the event was organized seamlessly, providing a valuable platform for knowledge sharing, innovation, and scholarly collaboration. Special thanks to our Patrons, Prof. (Dr.) S. B. Mujumdar, Founder and President of Symbiosis and Chancellor of SIU, and Prof. R. A. Mashelkar, former Director General of CSIR, and to our Mentors, Dr. Vidya Yeravdekar, Pro-Chancellor of SIU, Dr. Ramakrishnan Raman, Vice Chancellor of SIU, and Dr. Rajiv Yeravdekar, Provost of the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, for their guidance and continued encouragement of interdisciplinary research at the University. We also acknowledge, with appreciation, the participating institutions, research organizations, healthcare professionals, industry partners and funding agencies whose support strengthened both the reach and the rigour of SYMRESEARCH 2.0, and we extend a special word of thanks to our international delegates from France, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Nepal, whose presence enriched the conference with a truly worldwide perspective. These proceedings are, in the end, more than a compilation of 28 accepted papers. They are a record of the scientific community's determination to meet humanity's most pressing health challenges with methodological rigour, ethical seriousness and genuine interdisciplinary collaboration. Each paper included here has travelled a considerable distance — from an initial idea, through abstract screening, independent expert review, substantive revision and a final integrity check — before arriving in this volume, and that journey is itself a small testament to the discipline that good science requires. It is our sincere hope that readers will find in these pages not only new findings but also new questions, new collaborators and new directions for their own work. We invite readers to explore the contributions that follow, and to visit the conference website at https://symresearch.siu.edu.in/ for further information on the programme, speakers and future editions of SYMRESEARCH. We are pleased to present these Proceedings of SYMRESEARCH 2.0: Bioengineering for Global Health, in the hope that they will serve as a lasting and trustworthy resource for researchers, clinicians, engineers, policymakers and students committed to advancing science for the betterment of global health. Anuradha Vaidya
Ejaj Pathan
Yogesh Patil
Ganesh Ingavle
Date: 18-20 September 2025
Location: Pune, India (Offline)
Website: https://symresearch.siu.edu.in/ Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Lavale, Pune, India, has long stood as a confluence of disciplines, cultures and ideas, guided by the timeless Sanskrit precept "वसुधैव कुटुंबकम्" — The World is One Family. It was in the true spirit of this philosophy that the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences (FoMHS) and the Faculty of Engineering (FoE) came together to jointly conceive and organize SYMRESEARCH 2.0: Bioengineering for Global Health, an international conference held from 18 to 20 September 2025 at the Lavale, Pune campus. What began as an ambitious idea to bring biology and engineering into deliberate conversation with one another has, through the collective effort of patrons, mentors, organizers, reviewers and participants from across the world, matured into a substantial body of peer-reviewed scholarship. This proceedings volume is the tangible outcome of that endeavour. The conference theme, "Bioengineering for Global Health," and its accompanying call to action, "Re-engineering Health, Re-defining Health, Empowering Lives," were chosen deliberately. They signal a conviction that the health challenges confronting the world today — genetic and rare disorders, infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance, nutritional deficiencies, non-communicable and chronic diseases, ageing populations, climate-induced illness and widening healthcare disparities — cannot be resolved within the boundaries of a single discipline. They demand the deliberate fusion of biological insight with engineering ingenuity, of clinical experience with computational power, and of local knowledge with global collaboration. SYMRESEARCH 2.0 was designed as precisely such a meeting ground: a platform where scientists, clinicians, engineers, regulators, industry leaders, policymakers and students could gather not merely to present findings, but to identify research gaps and seed long-term collaborations capable of outlasting the three days of the conference itself. Health challenges rarely announce themselves in a form that fits neatly within a single department or a single discipline. A rise in antimicrobial-resistant infection is at once a microbiological problem, a diagnostics problem, a policy problem and, increasingly, a data problem. A delay in cancer diagnosis in a rural clinic is at once a biomedical-imaging problem, an infrastructure problem, and an artificial-intelligence (AI) problem waiting to be solved through affordable, deployable tools. SYMRESEARCH 2.0 was built on the premise that real solutions to such real problems are found not at the centre of any one field, but at the edges where it touches another. This is why the conference deliberately brought engineers into conversation with clinicians, computational scientists with microbiologists and policy specialists with bioinformaticians, so that the research presented here would be shaped, from its inception, by the practical constraints and possibilities of implementation and not only by theoretical elegance. This orientation is not incidental to Symbiosis's institutional identity; it is central to it. The University's motto finds contemporary expression in the national and global vision of "One Earth, One Family, One Future," and the organizers were conscious throughout of aligning the conference's scientific agenda with this larger purpose. Fittingly, the themes explored across SYMRESEARCH 2.0 collectively support twelve of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), spanning good health and well-being, clean water and sanitation, industry innovation, reduced inequalities, climate action, life below water and on land, and partnerships for the goals. Every paper in this volume, whatever its specific technical contribution, can therefore also be read as a contribution to this broader and shared human project. The scale and diversity of participation in SYMRESEARCH 2.0 bore out this global ambition. Over the course of three days, the conference drew close to 600 participants, including the delegates from France, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Nepal to join researchers and students from across India. This breadth of participation was not incidental; it reflected the versatility of the conference's scientific agenda and its ability to speak, simultaneously, to a molecular biologist in one country, a public health engineer in another, and a clinical AI researcher in a third. That an audience drawn from such varied academic, cultural and geographic backgrounds could find common cause in these five tracks is itself evidence that the health challenges at the heart of this conference are, in the truest sense, global, and that the solutions emerging from Bioengineering for Global Health must be built with an equally worldwide community of contributors. To translate this vision into a coherent scientific programme, the conference was structured around five thematic tracks, each addressing a distinct but interconnected dimension of bioengineering's promise for global health. The first track on Personalized Medicine engaged with one of the most consequential paradigms shifts in contemporary healthcare: the movement away from a "one-size-fits-all" model of treatment towards therapies calibrated to an individual's unique genetic, molecular and physiological profile. Advances in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, coupled with the analytical power of computational biology, are making such individualization possible at a scale unimaginable a generation ago. Contributions in this track examined pharmacogenomics, gene-editing technologies including CRISPR, CAR-T cell therapy, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, stem-cell-based interventions, nanomedicine, theranostics, immune engineering, and the thoughtful integration of traditional systems of medicine, including AYUSH, with evidence-based precision care. Taken together, these papers illustrate how personalization is steadily becoming not an aspiration but an operational reality of clinical practice. The second track focused on Microbial Research. It confronted a set of challenges that sit at the intersection of basic science and urgent public health need. On one hand, the deliberate engineering of microbial systems and the human microbiome holds real promise for preventing and treating infectious, inflammatory, nutritional and metabolic diseases. On the other, the escalating global threat of antimicrobial resistance continues to erode the effectiveness of existing therapeutics, demanding sharper tools for surveillance, diagnostics, vaccine development and antimicrobial stewardship. The papers gathered in this track span microbiome engineering, vaccine research, pathogen biology and novel antimicrobial strategies, reflecting a shared recognition that pandemic preparedness and everyday infectious-disease management are two faces of the same scientific problem. Biomedical Imaging, the third track, traced the rapid evolution of diagnostic technology from a purely observational tool into an active platform for disease prediction, treatment planning, precision intervention and longitudinal monitoring. The contributions in this section range across neuroimaging, musculoskeletal and cellular imaging, animal imaging, advanced acquisition techniques and computational image analysis, with a recurring emphasis on the integration of artificial intelligence into imaging workflows. This convergence of imaging science and machine learning is opening possibilities for earlier diagnosis and more confident clinical decision-making that were simply unavailable to previous generations of clinicians. Environmental Engineering for Public Health, the fourth track, took up the increasingly undeniable proposition that human health cannot be separated from the health of the environments in which people live. Climate change, air and water pollution, the management of healthcare and biomedical waste, food security, the emergence of new pathogens and rapid urbanization together constitute an interlinked set of pressures on public health systems, particularly in vulnerable and resource-constrained settings. The research presented here addresses sustainable healthcare waste management, climate-resilient public health infrastructure, environmental surveillance, food and nutrition security and policy interventions designed to protect the populations most exposed to these compounding risks. These contributions reaffirm a simple but easily forgotten truth: healthy societies require healthy ecosystems and engineering solutions that ignore this relationship will always be incomplete. The fifth and final track on Applied Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare, examined what is arguably the fastest-moving frontier in contemporary medicine. Machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, the Internet of Medical Things, blockchain-enabled health systems and multimodal AI are being applied across the entire continuum of care — from disease prediction and diagnostic imaging to clinical decision support, drug discovery, robotic surgery, telemedicine, wearable monitoring and personalized treatment planning. The papers in this track illustrate both the technical sophistication of these tools and a welcome and necessary caution about their responsible deployment, underscoring that intelligent systems are most valuable when they augment, rather than replace, clinical judgement. Complementing these five tracks, the conference opened with a day of pre-conference workshops that gave delegates hands-on exposure to techniques underpinning much of the research that followed. Sessions on stem cell biology, nanoscience and nanotechnology for healthcare, energy and environmental applications, quantitative magnetic resonance imaging, and technology-enabled healthcare gave early-career researchers and students a practical grounding before the scientific sessions began, reinforcing the conference's conviction that skill-building and knowledge-sharing must go hand in hand. The scholarly rigour behind these five tracks did not emerge by accident; it was built into the conference process from its earliest stages. SYMRESEARCH 2.0 invited structured abstracts from researchers/academicians and students across these five themes. A total of 153 abstracts were received. Following careful screening and review, a substantial number of abstracts were selected for poster and oral presentation at the conference itself, allowing early-stage and ongoing work to be shared and discussed directly with peers. Then after, authors who presented their papers in conference were invited to submit their full papers. While many papers were submitted, only 46 manuscripts were subjected to a rigorous double blind peer review, with every submission evaluated independently by two subject-matter experts drawn from the relevant field. Reviewers assessed manuscripts against established criteria of scientific soundness, methodological rigour, originality, clarity and relevance to the conference themes, and were also asked to flag any concerns regarding research and publication ethics. After peer review process, only 28 papers were finally selected for inclusion in this proceedings volume, to be published with Atlantis Press. This process was deliberately conservative rather than expansive. The Editorial Board took the view that a proceedings volume earns its value not by the number of papers it contains but by the confidence readers can place in each one. Every accepted paper in this volume has therefore passed through independent expert review, a mandatory revision cycle and a final integrity check consistent with Atlantis Press's publication policies on originality, plagiarism, authorship and conflicts of interest. We believe this discipline, though it inevitably meant that many worthy submissions could not ultimately be included, was essential to producing a volume that the scientific community can trust and build upon. The Editorial Board wishes to record its deep gratitude to the authors whose original research constitutes the substance of this volume, and whose willingness to engage constructively with reviewer feedback materially improved the quality of their contributions. We are equally grateful to the keynote speakers, invited experts, session chairs, peer reviewers, members of the scientific and organizing committees, student volunteers, and the institutional leadership of Symbiosis International (Deemed University), whose collective diligence made both the conference and this publication possible. Particular thanks to Prof. Anuradha Vaidya, the organizing secretary of SYMRESEARCH 2.0, whose enthusiastic leadership and commitment ensured that every aspect of the event was organized seamlessly, providing a valuable platform for knowledge sharing, innovation, and scholarly collaboration. Special thanks to our Patrons, Prof. (Dr.) S. B. Mujumdar, Founder and President of Symbiosis and Chancellor of SIU, and Prof. R. A. Mashelkar, former Director General of CSIR, and to our Mentors, Dr. Vidya Yeravdekar, Pro-Chancellor of SIU, Dr. Ramakrishnan Raman, Vice Chancellor of SIU, and Dr. Rajiv Yeravdekar, Provost of the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, for their guidance and continued encouragement of interdisciplinary research at the University. We also acknowledge, with appreciation, the participating institutions, research organizations, healthcare professionals, industry partners and funding agencies whose support strengthened both the reach and the rigour of SYMRESEARCH 2.0, and we extend a special word of thanks to our international delegates from France, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Nepal, whose presence enriched the conference with a truly worldwide perspective. These proceedings are, in the end, more than a compilation of 28 accepted papers. They are a record of the scientific community's determination to meet humanity's most pressing health challenges with methodological rigour, ethical seriousness and genuine interdisciplinary collaboration. Each paper included here has travelled a considerable distance — from an initial idea, through abstract screening, independent expert review, substantive revision and a final integrity check — before arriving in this volume, and that journey is itself a small testament to the discipline that good science requires. It is our sincere hope that readers will find in these pages not only new findings but also new questions, new collaborators and new directions for their own work. We invite readers to explore the contributions that follow, and to visit the conference website at https://symresearch.siu.edu.in/ for further information on the programme, speakers and future editions of SYMRESEARCH. We are pleased to present these Proceedings of SYMRESEARCH 2.0: Bioengineering for Global Health, in the hope that they will serve as a lasting and trustworthy resource for researchers, clinicians, engineers, policymakers and students committed to advancing science for the betterment of global health. Anuradha Vaidya
Ejaj Pathan
Yogesh Patil
Ganesh Ingavle