Isarar Siddique grew up in Deoria, a small district in eastern Uttar Pradesh where the nearest neurologist is a three-hour bus ride away. His grandfather had Alzheimer's. One morning, his grandfather looked at Isarar's brother Raiyan and asked who he was. That moment became the founding story of Zero Dementia.
At sixteen, Isarar started working at a local diagnostic centre, spending his afternoons running tests and his evenings reading papers on computational biology. By the time he entered his B.Tech in Biotechnology, he had already started cold-emailing research labs across India — and getting replies.
What followed was an unusual trajectory for someone from a town with no research infrastructure: IIT Bhubaneswar at nineteen, IISc Bangalore at twenty, ISRO's Physical Research Laboratory the same year, NASA's GeneLab Multi-Omics Working Group alongside Stanford and University of Miami, and then Harvard Medical School under Prof. Zi Chen — all before graduating.
At Harvard, Isarar won the University Innovation Award — a $5,000 grant that funded the first engineering build of what would become Zero Dementia. He brought the money back to India, incorporated Biotech Wallah with his brother in January 2025, and began translating his research network into clinical access.
Today, at 22, Isarar has ethics approval at three hospitals in Lucknow — two government, one private. The Indian government has given the company an office inside a government hospital. He holds a Genesis EIR 2.0 grant of ₹10 lakh from the Government of India, DPIIT recognition, and a provisional patent on multimodal biomarker fusion. Four papers are under review at BMC Digital Health and Springer journals.
His current research affiliations include Khalifa University (UAE) with Prof. Mohamed Elgendi and University of Malaya (Malaysia) as an AI lead researcher — both remote, both secondary to Zero Dementia.
His thesis is simple: India has 26 million people with dementia and three in four are never diagnosed. The screening tools that exist require English, a clinician, and a hospital visit. Hundreds of millions have access to none of these. Zero Dementia needs only a smartphone and thirty seconds of speech.