Dr. Bharat Rekhi

Bharat Rekhi is Professor and Pathologist at the Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai, working on adult and paediatric bone and soft-tissue tumours — the sarcomas, which are individually rare, collectively varied, and among the hardest diagnoses in the discipline to make correctly.

He sits on the WHO-IARC editorial board for the reporting system in soft-tissue cytopathology, is a standing committee member for the fifth and sixth editions of the WHO-IARC books, and is one of only four global members of the cytopathology editorial board. That places an Indian pathologist directly in the group that writes the definitions the rest of the world diagnoses by.

His research spans clinicopathological studies of soft-tissue and gynaecological tumours, new immunohistochemical markers, and the molecular diagnosis of sarcomas — the translocations and specific mutations identified by FISH, RT-PCR, sequencing and fragment analysis. He has also worked on cell blocks as a resource in gynaecological oncopathology.

He was formerly convener of Tata Memorial's bone and soft-tissue disease management group, the multidisciplinary body through which those cases are actually decided. Much of the published Indian data on bone and soft-tissue sarcoma outcomes comes from that hospital's registry.