Devaroop, Pratik’s brother-in-law, is my cycling buddy. I had heard about Pratik Panchal from Devaroop – and finally managed to meet up with him in Jan 2026 when he was vacationing in Pune. The Panchal family is based out of Mumbai, where Pratik’s dad worked with Mahindra and Mahindra.
Pratik finished his MBBS from Mumbai’s GS Medical college in 2008. He then went on to work as a physician in Mumbai for almost 5 years. The Gujarati DNA inside nudged him to the US, where the initial plan was to do his MD. He shifted base to NYC to work with a company that was doing clinical trials on HIV treatment protocols and antimicrobial therapy for Hospital Acquired Pneumonia at Mount Sinai hospital. Alongside, he started prepping for the USMLE and cleared the first three levels.
While contemplating a life of a clinician and comparing it to research, he found research to be a higher calling. Around this time he got engaged to a 5th generation South African Gujju. She nudged him to dream high – and apply to only Ivy League colleges for a Masters in Public health program.
The Ivy League is made of eight old private schools in the NorthEast: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. I think all of them have buildings which have the Boston Ivy creepers meandering across the front. Green walls made for excellent air conditioning – in a time when ACs did not exist. Btw, if you don’t trim the ivy, you could run into rodent problems. In that sense creepers with larger stems are better – as they do not require so much trimming.
Pratik was surprised when he got accepted by all the Ivies. Like all brand conscious desis, Pratik chose to enrol at Harvard in 2014. He followed it up for a one year post doc at Harvard Medical school in neo-natal medicine and a short stint at Mass General as a clinical research coordinator. He worked in the space of measuring HIV drug efficacy and the impact of indoor mosquito control sprays in tropical regions on pregnancies.
Around this time, marriage happened – and time came to settle down. Pratik had visited South Africa a few times, and thought that it would be a good place to continue his career. The family shifted base to Johannesburg where his in-laws stayed. Pratik found himself a job as a researcher at the University of Witwatersrand and worked on a project that aimed to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality.
In a twist of fate, as soon as the SA shift happened, his wife got an admit to a Masters program. She is an architect and she had been offered admission to the Masters in Urban Planning program at Harvard. After a year at Jo’burg, Pratik followed her back to Boston joining his alma mater as a research scientist.
Boston is a global hub for biology research – thanks to the presence of Harvard and MIT. Staying at HBS housing on campus, Pratik was in touch with a lot of startups. He had started volunteering at https://openbiome.org/ from 2014. OpenBiome launched the first public stool (poop) bank in the United States. Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) is a procedure that transfers fecal matter (stool) from a healthy donor into a patient’s gut to restore a balanced community of beneficial microbes, effectively treating severe gut issues, especially recurrent Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) infections with high success rates. In randomized blind trials, 95 percent of patients showed relief when treated with FMT. In contrast, only 55 percent respond to antibiotics. The stool is processed into a usable solution or capsules, and delivered via colonoscopy, endoscopy, enema, or oral capsules.
As of 2025, Open Biome has done 72,000 investigational treatments in 1,300 hospitals and clinics. In 2017, Pratik got a full time position at Open Biome. With his background in bio-informatics, he helped develop a toolkit to come up with a design for a network of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) treatment centers. He also helped create guidelines for a FMT donor screening program. There is a danger of infections being spread through stool donation. Open Biome learned from the mistakes made in creating blood banks. A lot of Hepatitis C and HIV infections happened because of inadequate screening of the donated blood. The FDA issued safety alerts in 2020 for potential bacterial transmission from FMT products, prompting OpenBiome to enhance donor screening. From 2024, FDA required stool banks to comply with Investigational New Drug rules for FMT products.
The Open Biome team worked on identifying pathogenic bacteria markers. Research is also going on to identify the relationship between bacteria and the human Immune system. This may help find good cures for Multiple Sclerosis and Psoriasis. There is also a movement of studying bacterial eco-systems instead of individual strains. Current bacterial research focuses on isolating individual strains – and then trying to culture them. This is primarily because the US FDA insists on consistency in any therapy. With 1500 strains of gut bacteria, the real challenge is in identifying the nutritional medium required for their growth. It’s not just human-bacteria interfacing that is a challenge, it is also bacteria-bacteria interactions. In the gut, the presence of symbiotic species means that we are not too sure what part of the nutrient digestion is done by which strain of bacteria.
The discussion then moved on to another area of interest for me: allergies. Pratik pointed out that the US is the allergen capital of the world. One of the reasons is their fetish for cleanliness. In the early days of the 20th century, US urban planners, in their wisdom, decided to plant only male species of trees so that falling fruits of female trees don’t litter the ground. While ground pollution got prevented, air pollution took a toss. With no female flowers ready to accept their offerings, pollen loads shot up in the air. Come spring, Pratik observes a lining of pollen dust on his car every morning. This pollen has exacerbated the working of the immune system, leading to allergies.
We then moved to another area of interest: sustainability. Pratik’s better half works with the world bank on climate mitigation projects. Most of her work is in East Europe and Asia. When the couple went house shopping in the pandemic, they were specifically looking for houses which were more sustainable. Houses built in the seventies to nineties, did not bother too much about energy conservation. The build quality was also mediocre – with expected life of only 20 to 30 years. The Panchals ended up buying a new rowhouse, which had been built by a developer with a green heart. Heating is the biggest driver of energy usage in the US Northeast, with the average household spending about 800 dollars a month on energy in the winter months. The Panchal house in Boston, in contrast, sips just $200 per month of electricity in winter. (Indian households thankfully are much more frugal – thanks to our tropical climate.)
The house has triple glazed windows – and was tested with an air pressure calibrated leakage test. Having lesser leakages means better thermal inertia, and lower heating requirements. In older houses, leakage takes care of the fresh air requirement, but their house has to work differently. A separate provision is made for fresh air intake. A heat exchanger transfers heat from the outgoing exhausted air to the incoming cold air, thereby cutting down energy consumption. The outgoing air flows through a membrane which keeps the moisture inside. The house uses a 50 gallons storage geyser which works out to be more energy efficient than instant geysers.
They wanted to invest in geothermal heating but it was difficult to retrofit as it involves laying pipes at depths of 10-20 feet. You need a thermally stable zone through which the pipes must pass. Like a lot of houses in their neighborhood, they don’t have a gas connection – cooking is done on induction stoves. Old gas pipelines in their neighbourhood are being repurposed as geothermal heating projects.
Around the time Pratik bought his house, he joined Takeda, a Japanese pharma giant, with an R and D center in Boston, and continued his work on inflammatory bowel disease. Fun fact: The highest density of global pharma R and D centres is in a single ZIP code in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Takeda, Pratik is a translational scientist, one who bridges the gap between basic scientific discoveries and real-world health applications. He is working on biomarker discovery and early clinical development for treatment of inflammatory bowel disease. Inflammatory bowel syndrome is a chronic disease where patients have great difficulty in passing stools – as there are lesions and blood coming into stools. There is a similar disease – irritable bowel syndrome, where the lesions are much smaller.
Pratik has published more than 25 papers in refereed journals. He is mulling doing a Ph.D in immunology – which should not be too tough, given his work with European universities on joint projects of Takeda and the European Commission. Pratik has worked previously in India on medical systems and community health – including a stint in Bangladesh. Pratik continues to retain his Indian passport, although he has been eligible for US citizenship for a few years. My father in law has been a big fan of urine therapy. (So was one of our earlier Prime Ministers – Morarji Desai.) I hope Pratik comes back and gets Indian pharma to invest in naturopathy and poop treatments