Page 41 - Annual report 2021-22

Annual Report 2021-22 |

Soumya Sinha Roy

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Soumya Sinha Roy’s lab works in the area of cell biology of metabolic diseases. His lab has been
recently working in the area of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). His lab is developing a new
in vitro chronic cellular model of NAFLD, which is of great importance in understanding the
pathogenesis of the disease. Till now the in vitro model systems remain challenging to study all the
features of NAFLD. There are several studies which have addressed steatosis and oxidative stress, and
underlying mechanisms individually using in vitro model systems, instead of tracking multiple parallel
cellular events and identifying how this networked interaction impacts NAFLD risk. Existing in vitro
models have several lacunae: (i) Acute treatment is unable to mimic chronic disease condition, (ii) the
model involves use of a high concentration of fatty acids, (iii) use of single type of fatty acids, (iv) use
of hepatocarcinoma cells line. To overcome these lacunae, his group is generating an NAFLD model
using non-cancerous hepatocytes, using optimum concentration, and combination of FA in a chronic
progression mode. HHL17 cell line, a transformed primary human hepatocyte line (non-cancerous) is
being used for this work. Growth phase synchronization with serum starvation followed by exposure
to a mixture of palmitic and oleic acid at 0.25 mM. With chronic exposure over a 5-day period, this
model exhibits gradual increase in neutral lipid accumulation. In the future this model will be
subjected to a series of transcriptome and proteome analysis and compared with data from available
NAFLD patient dataset to study the signatures and the interrelation of autophagy-ER stress-
mitochondrial dysfunction axis. Soumya’s lab is also working towards development of a mouse model
for this disease.

Soumya’s lab is also working towards understanding mitochondria donation capacity of mesenchymal
stem cells (MSCs) that can be exploited for the treatment of metabolic syndrome (MetS). In this work,
his lab has established isolation, characterization and culturing of MSCs from control and MetS
animals. Comparison of MSCs from control and MetS mouse in terms of their metabolic and cellular
health is underway. This research will compare the efficacy of organelle donation capacity of these
two types of MSCs for regaining the health of stressed cells in vitro and in vivo.