Dr. Ranabir Das is Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He has worked extensively on the mechanisms used by viruses and bacteria to hijack the human cell signaling pathways and shut off the host’s immune response. Dr. Das’ laboratory has shown how the family of Herpes simplex viruses uses human proteins to transcribe the viral DNA and produce viral proteins. His lab showed how the proteins from Shigella shut down the immune response in a human and replicated efficiently. These studies have provided novel insights into how pathogens survive inside the host and have helped identify new therapeutic targets for drug discovery.
Dr. Das has published 23 papers in the last five years in several journals, like Nature Communications, the Journal of American Chemical Society, eLife, ChemComm among others. Multiple grant agencies have generously funded his research work. Dr. Das has received the prestigious Prof. S. Subramanian 60th Birthday Lecture Award, the Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship and the NCI Director’s Innovation Award among several others. He has been a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Biophysical Society, and the NMR Society of India.
During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Das is working to understand how the pathogenic bacteria Shigella silences the inflammatory response in the intestinal cells to multiply effectively. This work may help identify new therapeutic targets to counter multi-drug resistant Shigella infection.