Sendurai Mani

Biography

Sendurai Mani was born in a small town in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. His parents never received a formal education, and are farmers. He completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at the Madurai Kamaraj University. Dr. Mani was then accepted with a scholarship at the Indian Institute of Science. There he earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology under Professor Govindarajan Padmanabhan, a former director of the Indian Institute of Science. Dr. Mani was the first person from his hometown to earn a doctorate degree.

Dr. Mani then pursued postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute / Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the mentorship of Professor Robert Weinberg. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Weinberg lab Dr. Mani and his colleague Jing Yang demonstrated that the latent embryonic program known as the Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) is critical for the development of metastasis.

Dr. Mani joined the faculty of MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas in 2007 and was promoted to Professor with Tenure. In 2022, Dr. Mani was appointed as an associate director for Translational Oncology at Legorreta Cancer Center, at Brown University and a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

Dr. Mani's laboratory investigates how cancer cells develop to become metastatic. Dr. Mani was the first to demonstrate that cancer cells acquire stem cell properties by activating the EMT program, which allows them to survive better in the blood and establish a metastasis histopathologically similar to that of the parental primary tumor. In this highly influential article, Dr. Mani and colleagues identified various novel attributes of metastatic cancer cells and provided the foundation and an explanation for the presence of cellular plasticity within the tumor. Dr. Mani and his team continue to investigate ways to treat metastasis.

Dr. Mani spoke at TEDx Providence in 2023 about "Why do people get cancer, how it spreads, and how to prevent it? Dr. Mani co-founded SathGen Biotech, a subdivision of Godavari Biorefineries, with Mr. Samir Somaiya of Somaiya Group, Mumbai, India and he co-founded Iylon Precision Oncology with Dr. Sewanti Limaye.