Dr. Shrilakshmi: The Scientist Who Listened to Her Gut, and Changed the World’s

The Woman Who Left a Dream Career to Decode the Most Powerful Intelligence System in Your Body

A ShePower Special Feature for SheSight Magazine

There is a question Dr. Shrilakshmi Desiraju asks every audience she speaks to, whether it is a room full of investors, a college full of young women scientists, or a stage at a women’s entrepreneurship summit.

“Have you ever woken up some mornings feeling like you could take on the entire world, and then woken up other mornings not knowing what hit you, blaming it on whose face you saw first, or which side of the bed you rolled off from?”

Every hand in the room goes up. Every single time.

“Now,” she says, “go back and think about what you ate the night before.”

That one question holds the entire universe of Dr. Shri’s life’s work: the gut. Not as a digestive organ. Not as a medical inconvenience. But as the most sophisticated, most underestimated intelligence centre in the human body, one that communicates with your brain at a hundredth of a nanosecond, influences every decision you make, shapes your mood, your immunity, your resilience, and, for women navigating the storm of hormonal change, your very sense of self.

Dr. Shrilakshmi Desiraju, known widely as Dr. Shri, is the co-founder of AA probics, a deep-tech biotech company headquartered in Mysuru, India. She holds global patents across the United States, Canada, and Europe for a technology that the scientific community long considered out of reach: a naturally derived probiotic bacterium that survives without refrigeration, stable up to 200 degrees centigrade, achieved without genetic modification, chemical encapsulation, or cold chain dependency. That breakthrough has attracted Series A funding from a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, contributed to policy at the G20 level twice, including to the MP Bioeconomy framework, earned her a place as an Independent Director on company boards, and taken her to the TEDx stage.

She is not a wellness influencer. She is a PhD medicinal chemist with postdoctoral training at India’s premier institutions, including NCL Pune and IISc Bangalore, who went on to an MBA in technology commercialisation at the University of Alberta, and came back to India in 2009 to build something that had never been built before.

Her story is, in equal measure, a story about perseverance, a story about a woman building something in a country and a sector that were not built to welcome her, and a story about the gut, literally and figuratively, it takes to do something that has never been done before.

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The Decision That Changed Everything

In 2009, Dr. Shri did something most people around her could not quite understand. She packed up 16 years of life in Canada, where she had been doing cutting-edge pharmaceutical research, and came back to India. Not for family. Not because things had fallen apart. She came back with a purpose.

“It was not some random decision,” she says. “I am one of those people who is very restless until I have the next big goal.”

The big goal was rooted in something that had been quietly unsettling her throughout her scientific career: she understood how to create molecules, but she did not understand why some extraordinary molecules never made it to market, while far less impressive ones became blockbusters. That gap between science and commercialisation nagged at her enough that she did something unusual for someone with her credentials. She enrolled in an MBA, specialising in technology commercialisation at the University of Alberta.

Getting accepted was its own battle. The Dean of the business school spent three hours trying to understand why a PhD-holding scientist with a stellar research record wanted a second master’s degree. Dr. Shri spent those three hours explaining, calmly and systematically, that knowing how to create something and knowing how to bring it to the world were two entirely different skills. She had one. She needed the other.

The MBA gave her the commercial lens she had been missing. It also, almost incidentally, revealed that she was built to be an entrepreneur. She did not fully know that yet. The Dean could see it before she could.

When she returned to India, she brought with her a scientist’s precision, a newly acquired commercialisation mindset, and a conviction that India had far more to offer the world than headcount and back-office services. She wanted to create molecules. She wanted to bring original Indian biotech products to a global market. She wanted to prove it was possible, from Mysuru, on a loan secured by nothing but a project report and sheer will.

What she did not account for was quite how hard that proof would be to extract.

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The Bank, the Bacteria, and Five Months of Sitting in a Waiting Room

Building a biotech company requires a physical lab. A lab requires money. And in 2009, getting a collateral-free loan as a woman scientist with no male co-signatory and a business plan built around “good bacteria” was, according to at least one bank manager, simply not how things worked in India.

“Good bacteria?” she recalls being told. “We only know bad bacteria. What are you talking about, ma’am?”

From October to February, Dr. Shri went to that bank every ten days. She sat in the waiting room. She watched bank managers call impromptu internal meetings the moment they saw her face walking through the door. She was asked, repeatedly, which male family member would stand as guarantor. Her husband did not understand what she was doing. Her father did not understand. Her father-in-law did not understand. She did not ask any of them to stand. She told the bank that if something went wrong, she would face whatever music needed to be faced. Alone.

Eventually, a government directive from the Reserve Bank of India gave her the opening she needed. Every bank branch was required to issue at least one collateral-free loan to a woman entrepreneur and one to an SC/ST candidate. The bank managers who had been avoiding her found themselves caught between their own reluctance and a written regulatory obligation. They gave her the loan: one million rupees, secured on nothing more than her detailed project report and her refusal to leave.

She then negotiated the interest rate down from 14.4 percent to 9.2 percent over the life of the loan, returning to that same bank every year, pointing out that she had never missed an EMI and asking, politely but persistently, why they were not rewarding a reliable borrower. On a million rupees, even a quarter-percent reduction adds up. She put every rupee of savings back into the company and the research.

“If you don’t ask,” she says, “you will not get anything. I learned that in Canada. And it is the truest thing I know.”

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Watch her full podcast with the Founder of SheSight Global, Dr.CeeVee.

Six Years, One Breakthrough, and 200 Degrees Centigrade

The scientific problem Dr. Shri set out to solve was deceptively simple to describe. Probiotics, the good bacteria essential to gut health, are temperature-sensitive and pH-sensitive. Keep yoghurt on a table and it goes bad within two to three days. Keep it in a refrigerator and it lasts ten. The bacteria driving that fermentation are highly temperature-dependent. Cold chain logistics make probiotics expensive. Encapsulation introduces chemical processes. Room temperature stability was considered the practical ceiling of what was achievable.

Dr. Shri imposed a different ceiling on herself and a strict constraint: no genetic modification, no encapsulation, no chemical interference with the organism. She would find a way to make the bacterium stable through science alone. Pure, patient, iterative science conducted in a small lab in Mysuru on a tight budget, year after year.

Six years later, she had not merely achieved room temperature stability. She had created a naturally derived gut bacterium stable up to 200 degrees centigrade, a first in the world. The implications were transformative. Applications that were previously impossible became viable: probiotics in gummies, chocolates, cookies, and bread, formats that had never before been able to carry live bacteria without refrigeration. Accessibility for the lactose-intolerant, who had no way to consume dairy-based probiotic formats. A supply chain finally freed from cold chain dependency. A product that could travel, be stored, and reach populations that cold-chain logistics had always left behind.

She filed patents. Not just in India. Across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

She entered the Economic Times Power of Ideas competition. She won. Twenty-five finalists were taken to IIM Ahmedabad and groomed to become investor-ready. And then came the real education.

She pitched 180 investors.

Not all of them said no, exactly. Most of them understood what she had built. But her requirement was not seed capital. She needed 40 crore rupees to build a manufacturing unit, because you cannot sell bulk probiotics at commercial scale from a small research lab. You cannot change an industry two grams at a time.

One hundred and seventy-nine conversations. One hundred and seventy-nine near-misses.

After the 170th conversation, she changed her approach entirely. Instead of pitching broadly, she identified four or five investors who had themselves grown slowly, through patience and a long view of value, people from industries that understood that transformative science takes time to commercialise. She found a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company that understood precisely what she was holding and exactly why it would take time. They had been there before themselves.

Series A funding. Secured. And from there, a journey to the G20 policy table, twice, including her contribution to the MP Bioeconomy framework, because a scientist who has actually built something in biotech from the ground up has things to say about policy that theorists do not.

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What the Gut Actually Does: A Science Lesson Worth Reading

Before you can appreciate what Dr. Shri has built, you need to understand what the gut actually is, far beyond its reputation as a digestive system.

The science is relatively recent. It was around 2008 to 2012 that researchers began to seriously invest in understanding the gut microbiome: the living ecosystem of bacteria residing in your intestine. What they found rewrote the understanding of human health in ways that are still reverberating through medicine, nutrition science, and psychiatry.

You are born with a sterile gut. The moment you enter the world and open your lungs, the bacteria in your environment begin to colonise you. The first six months of an infant’s life are critical. A mother’s milk, delivered every two to six hours, builds the first line of immunity. In India, the ceremony called Annaprashan, the child’s first solid food at around six months, is a cultural acknowledgement of this milestone. The most critical phase of microbial establishment is complete. The child is moving forward. The gut ecosystem begins its next stage of development.

By adulthood, you carry approximately 1.38 trillion bacteria in your gut, across 7,000-plus species, at least in India, where dietary diversity and traditional food practices have historically supported exceptional microbial heterogeneity. These bacteria are your first line of immune defence. They also communicate with your brain at a hundredth of a nanosecond, faster than conscious thought, through a channel now documented as the gut-brain axis.

An ideal gut ratio is approximately 85 percent good bacteria to 15 percent bad. When that balance tips, the consequences are not merely digestive. They are cognitive, emotional, and immunological. Serotonin, the chemical most closely associated with happiness, stability, and calm, is primarily produced in the gut. So is dopamine. When gut bacteria are depleted or imbalanced, those chemicals are not produced in sufficient quantities. What follows can present as anxiety, low mood, persistent brain fog, decision fatigue, or a creeping inability to perform at the standard you know you are capable of.

This is the gut-brain axis. Not a metaphor. A measurable, documented communication channel between your microbiome and your central nervous system, one that Dr. Shri has spent her career understanding, disrupting, and rebuilding through precision science.

COVID, she points out, provided a dramatic and involuntary clinical demonstration of why microbial heterogeneity matters. Indian and African populations, both characterised by high diversity in their gut microbiomes thanks to traditional diets and environmental exposure, fared significantly better against the virus than populations in colder climates with lower microbial diversity. The immune system’s ability to mount a varied, layered response depended on the diversity of the microbial army it could call on.

“If you survived COVID in India,” Dr. Shri says with a smile, “you should be grateful to the Almighty, and to the panipuriwala on the road, who has been putting his hand inside and building your bacterial diversity for years.”

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Why Perimenopause Is a Gut Health Crisis in Disguise

For women navigating perimenopause and menopause, the gut story becomes even more specific and more urgent.

Dr. Shri poses a question that stops many women in their tracks: did you know when your grandmother went through menopause? Did you even notice? She did not notice when her own mother went through it. The transition happened quietly, without the now-familiar constellation of symptoms: anxiety, palpitations, joint inflammation, brain fog, skin changes, eroding confidence, sleeplessness, and a feeling of losing grip on a self that used to feel solid.

Why is menopause more disruptive today than it was a generation ago?

Part of the answer is cultural: it has only recently become acceptable to speak about it openly, which means the difficulties that existed before were simply absorbed in silence. But part of the answer is genuinely physiological, and it connects directly to the gut.

Oestrogen has a direct relationship with specific gut bacteria that help regulate its metabolism in the body. As oestrogen declines through perimenopause, the microbial balance shifts. When the microbial balance shifts, the production of serotonin and dopamine drops. When those chemicals drop, anxiety rises, sleep deteriorates, confidence falters, and the cognitive sharpness that high-performing women have always taken for granted begins to blur.

Layered on top of this is accelerated calcium depletion, increasing the risk of osteoporosis, rheumatic arthritis, and joint inflammation. Layered on top of that is the broader nutritional depletion from food sources that no longer carry the micronutrients the body needs to navigate this transition. Decades of fertiliser and pesticide use have stripped up to 40 to 45 percent of the nutrition from the soil, which means even the food we consider healthy is no longer delivering what it once did.

“That small amount of Vitamin B7 that I need for my hair?” Dr. Shri says. “Thirty micrograms a day. It is no longer reliably available from the food we are eating. And we have done that to ourselves.”

Her practical guidance for women who want to begin addressing this is clear and actionable.

First, increase fibre, specifically through millets, which are rich in vitamins, minerals, and fermentable fibre that feeds good bacteria, supports digestion, and is easy on the gut.

Second, take targeted supplements rather than generic multivitamins. Vitamin D3 paired with Vitamin K2 is critical: D3 alone is not enough, because without K2, the calcium it mobilises does not reliably travel to the bones where it is needed. Critically, Vitamin D3 supplementation should never begin without a blood test confirming deficiency, because excess Vitamin D3 carries its own health risks. And always choose plant-based, vegan-sourced supplements wherever possible: the body absorbs them far more efficiently than animal-derived equivalents.

Third, consider the gut test itself. AA probics now offers a gut microbiome analysis kit that produces a 46-page diagnostic report. It identifies which bacterial species are depleted, which harmful bacteria are present, what neurotransmitters and post-biotics are being produced or withheld, and which antibiotics the individual has already developed resistance to. For menopausal women specifically, a vaginal microbiome analysis is also available. Oestrogen decline significantly changes the bacterial landscape of the vaginal microbiome, reducing diversity from 15 to 17 species in a healthy woman to as few as four in women in colder, lower-diversity environments, sharply raising the risk of recurring infections and the discomfort that many women are told to simply accept as part of ageing.

“Personalisation in nutrition,” Dr. Shri says, “is the next frontier in gut health. Your gut is as unique as your thumbprint. A product that works beautifully for one woman may do very little for another, because their microbial ecosystems are different. We now have the tools to understand that difference and act on it.”

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The Gender Difference She Will Not Claim but Cannot Ignore

In her research and her clinical work, Dr. Shri has noticed something she is careful to frame as observation rather than settled science, for now.

Women, she believes, are inherently more equipped to manage stress than men. And the gut may be a significant part of why.

The practice of fasting, embedded for generations in Indian women’s cultural and spiritual lives, creates periodic conditions in which the gut microbiome is reset and good bacteria are preserved. Physical activity, historically woven into the domestic and agricultural labour of women, drives the production of serotonin and dopamine. The constant management of family, community, social obligation, and professional output, simultaneously, may have shaped a female microbiome that is slightly more stress-resilient than its male equivalent.

During COVID, her observations were consistent: women who contracted the virus and experienced high cytokine stress responses survived it better on average than men with comparable levels of infection. Men collapsed faster. Women endured.

“I do not yet have the full scientific base to make a formal claim,” she says, carefully. “But these are patterns I keep seeing. And the gut bacteria do behave differently in a woman’s body.”

What she is certain of is this: the woman who takes her gut health seriously, who feeds her microbiome thoughtfully, who understands the gut-brain axis and uses the precision nutrition tools now available to her, is building biological resilience from the inside out. That resilience shows up as clearer thinking, more stable mood, sharper decisions, and a greater capacity to absorb and recover from the stresses of leadership, caregiving, entrepreneurship, and simply being alive in this era.

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Perseverance Is Not a Soft Skill. It Is the Whole Game.

Dr. Shri works extensively with women in STEM, visiting colleges and schools, mentoring women scientists who want to become entrepreneurs, sitting on platforms and organisations dedicated to bringing more women into deep tech and the bioeconomy. She has a TEDx talk behind her and a G20 contribution to her name. She has an Independent Director role that brings the voice of a practicing scientist into boardroom decisions.

And when asked what single message she carries for women, she does not hesitate.

“There could not be a better time to be born in this era. There could not be a better time to go out and explore what you can do, and what you cannot. Not everything will work. But there could not be a better time to find that out.”

She is direct about what entrepreneurship actually demands from women. Marriage, she says, can be a part of life. It cannot be the whole of it. And women in India who choose to build companies do not get a pass on everything else. They still set the morning coffee. They still set the evening curd to ferment. They still hold the social calendar, the birthday logistics, the family obligations, and then walk into the boardroom and are expected to perform at the same level as someone whose only job that morning was to get themselves there.

“We are a very strong species,” she says. “Mentally strong. I do not see why we should be saying that we need help. I think it is the other gender that needs it.”

It is said with a laugh. But underneath it is a serious point, and a generous one: women have always been building extraordinary things under conditions that were never designed for them. That has not stopped a single one of the great ones. It has only made the building more complex, more textured, and ultimately more worth doing.

Dr. Shrilakshmi Desiraju co-founded AA probics in Mysuru, held her ground at a bank counter for five months, pitched 180 investors, spent six years in a lab, and emerged with patents on three continents, a Fortune 500 backer, two G20 policy contributions, a TEDx platform, and a company at the frontier of personalised gut health science.

She did not do it in spite of being a woman. She did it entirely as one.

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What She Wants You to Walk Away Knowing

If you wake up some mornings with the world under your feet and other mornings unable to explain the fog: look at what you ate.

If you are navigating perimenopause and finding that the symptoms feel more disruptive than anything your mother seemed to experience: look at your gut, your fibre intake, your Vitamin D3 levels, and the nutritional quality of what you are actually eating.

If you are a woman in science or entrepreneurship, sitting on something worth building, waiting for the funding to confirm, the timing to improve, or the right person to give you permission:
Dr. Shri’s answer is simple.
“Ask. Because if you don’t ask, you will not get. The right time is already here.”

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