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Azhar Rizvi’s Comments:
Tahira Khan is my mentee from NUST. I mentored her for five months at the NUST competition in preparing a business plan and enabling her to pitch the proposal at a big forum. She is developing a cancer cure using virotherapy and is working with a common local strand of Rani Khet virus. She is very hopeful about the initial results of her endeavor and is now proceeding to the next stage of testing. If all goes well, she will have a result in the next two or three years.
The biotechnology industry stands at the forefront of science. Inspired biotechnologists and life scientists are pushing boundaries to find cures for the most critical health problems facing humans today.
Tahira Khan belongs to this elite group of researchers. She is an ordinary urban Pakistani girl pursuing a Master’s degree at the Atta-ur-Rahman School of Applied Biosciences (ASAB) at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST).
Her childhood inspiration was a cartoon character Dexter who owned a laboratory. Watching this cartoon as a child, she began wanting to work in her very own lab one day. With that vision in mind, Tahira embarked on a journey at NUST in the field of biotechnology to find a cure for cancer when a loved one passed away from this disease.
She is currently working on developing a virotherapy solution for liver cancer using a local strain of the Rani Khet virus. She has developed and tested the treatment under lab conditions with positive outcomes and is working towards testing it further before embarking on commercialization.
