Ravinder Dhallan

Ravinder (Rav) Dhallan is the chairman and chief executive officer of Ravgen.

Dhallan earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, then began a residency in radiation oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Later, after deciding to found the startup firm Ravgen, he studied business at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, receiving an MBA in 2007.

According to a 2007 CNN profile, after Dhallan had begun his residency and fathered two children, his wife suffered two miscarriages, which caused him to be “struck by how little information was available to women who experienced complications during pregnancy....so he resolved to invent a better prenatal diagnostic exam.” Amniocentesis provides 100% accurate results, but has a one-in-200 risk of causing a miscarriage and cannot be carried out until 15 or 18 weeks into the pregnancy; existing non-invasive prenatal screenings, meanwhile, have low accuracy rates. As an alternative to these procedures, Dhallan developed and patented Rapid Analysis of Variations in the Genome, which involves drawing two tablespoons of blood from the expectant mother, isolating fetal DNA cells, and checking them for chromosome 21, the marker for Down syndrome. The method is 99% accurate and can be performed eight weeks into a pregnancy.

In order to develop and exploit his procedure, Dhallan founded and incorporated the biotech startup firm RavGen. Meanwhile, he left oncology to do a residency in emergency medicine at York Hospital in York, Pennsylvania. He then became an attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland. According to CNN, he discovered that “the emergency room turned out to be great training for the daily high-wire act of running a startup. 'You get perspective,' says Dhallan. 'Once you've dealt with life and death day in and day out, other problems seem trivial.' The ER also helped him develop strong leadership skills. 'If someone has been shot six times, everyone is looking at the physician's response,' Dhallan says. 'If I didn't look confident, then everyone would lose confidence.'”

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