Biology
Prof. Sudhir Krishna
National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru
The major viral illnesses of our times have all followed crossing the species barrier, whether it is Ebola, HIV, SARS or several other viruses. See for example “Global Distribution of Relative Risk of an Emerging Infectious Disease Event” Jones, Patel, Levy, et. al. Nature, 2008 , whch places India as a major hot spot. Coupled with the changing paradigm in virology of metagenomics using NGS, one can now address these issues in a multiprong inter-institutional way. I will describe the efforts of Chitra Pattabiraman, Anuj Kumar, along with the Manipal Virus Centre, Strand Life Sciences and several other collaborators in building a infecious disease ecoystem using genomic, digital and old fashioned virology tools.
Our long standing interest has been in DNA tumor viruses and the major focus of the lab has been in human cervical cancers, a disease initiated and sustained by human papillomaviruses. Our major effort has been in positioning Notch signaling as a key complement of papillomavirus function in mediating malignant transformation. More recently, we have been looking at heterogeneity in human cervical cancer progression and in particular focussed on a sub-set of CD66+ cells. I will review the work of Jeevisha Bajaj, Tessy Maliekal, Chitra Pattabiraman, Aswathy Ammothumkandy, Calvin Rodrigues and Leanna Rose Joy and our collaborators in Kidwai and Adyar Cancer centres. I will briefly mention the work of Reety Arora in looking at another virus of the same family which causes Merkel Cell Carcinomas.
Time permitting, I will describe our efforts from 2008 onwards with what began as a joint teaching with medics and culminated in a full fledged inter campus (with St. John’s Medical College) effort in hematology genomics and how we have transitioned in 2016 to younger investigators. In particular the use of Crispr and NGS, to develop specific platforms has been a rewarding exercise along with the nucleation of Clinical Research fellows.
