Employing bioengineering for understanding complex human diseases

Employing bioengineering for understanding complex human diseases

 

Sonal Datta, Ph.D

DBT Bio-CARe Scientist, CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology,

Sector-39A, Chandigarh-160036, India

 

Molecular understanding of complex human diseases has significantly improved in last few years. This improved understanding has resulted from extensive use of recently evolved methods of bioengineering. Bioengineering can be done at the genetic level for creating recombinant bacteria or at protein level for enhancing and imparting novel functions to the desired protein or at a multi-cellular organism level to create transgenic organisms. This will be exemplified with specific use of transgenic mice models harboring CGG triplet repeat (this repeat expansion leads to the fragile X syndrome in humans). Using this transgenic animal model the genetic and molecular basis of triplet repeat expansion was elucidated. The second example will be of use of genetic engineering and 3-dimensional cell culture/tissue engineering for understanding the molecular basis of progression of cancer through H-Ras and Bmi-1 oncogenes. The third example that would be discussed will be of a protein engineering based approach to improve the therapeutic efficacy of recombinant human G-CSF protein which is an important component of support therapy to avoid chemotherapy induced Neutropenia.  

Dr. Sonal Datta is a DBT Bio-CARe Scientist at the CSIR - Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH), Chandigarh. She earned her PhD degree in Biomedical Science at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research, University of Delhi, Delhi under Prof. Vani Bramhachari in 2003. She worked as a Research Associate at Dr. B R Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research in 2003, and then moved to the Fienberg School of Medicine, Nothwestern University, Evanston, Illinois as postdoctoral fellow in 2003. At Northwestern, she was promoted to Research Associate position in 2004. She moved to the Department of Microbiology, University of Alabama in Birmingham, Birmingham, AL in 2006. She joined the current position at IMTECH in April 2013. Dr. Datta has about ten years of research experiences and her major research accomplishments are establishing the role of Bmi-1 and activated H-Ras in cellular transformation;deciphering the role of a polycomb group protein in cellular senescence and cellular proliferation; and establishing molecular basis of CGG repeat expansion using transgenic mouse
models. She has published about six research articles in peer-reviewed journals.