Inter disciplinary team building to tackle 21st century viral challenges in India and Africa

Our primary interest is in cervical cancers: papillomavirus driven malignancy of major public health significance in both India and Africa. We have focused on identifying the signalling pathways that complement the function of papillomavirus oncogenes. In particular, we have delineated the role of Notch signalling in driving human cervical cancer progression (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yexcr.2019.111682). The talk will cover some of the background and the drug design challenges ahead. The above program is primarily funded by TIFR and DBT.

Our other interest is in Dengue viruses and we have obtained a 3-year grant from Narayana Murthy, co-founder Infosys, to enable the development of a novel Dengue vaccine. We have undertaken a fairly large scale sequencing analysis across the country of Dengue genomes and are currently designing novel vaccine constructs. In parallel, in Nairobi, we have set up a pathogen capacity effort to support this program (https://kavi-icr.uonbi.ac.ke/content/nanopore-sequencing-training). Tacking 21st-century viruses will require interdisciplinary teams of bioinformatics, computer experts, virologists, health systems specialists all working together and I will describe some of our efforts in nucleating such teams in both India and Africa.