Page 42 - Annual report 2021-22

Annual Report 2021-22 |

Swarnendu Bag

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Swarnendu Bag’s lab focuses on the study of Proteomics and Metabolomics for early detection,
prognosis and predictive marker discovery of different types of cancer and metabolic disorders.
Presently, his lab is working on cancer proteomics and metabolomics with special reference to
immunotherapy in the light of spatiotemporal dimension at single-cell resolution. Tumor cells follow
different strategies to suppress the immune cells’ metabolism leading to inhibit the functionality of
immune cells. But the metabolic cross-talk between tumor cells & immune cells was not fully explored.
Henceforth, to decode these ambiguities regarding the metabolic competition amongst tumor cells
and various types of immune cells in the heterogeneous niche of tumor microenvironment, a
standardized immune-metabolomic & proteomic study‐protocol is very necessary.

In this work, he will be developing methods for isolating, analyzing and quantifying metabolites and
proteins from sorted single-type immune cells. This will involve LC-MS/MS method development. In
the preliminary standardization phase, isolation of total PBMC from normal human blood was
performed by using lymphoprep reagent (density gradient medium). After counting the total PBMC,
shorting of CD4+ & CD8+ cells were done by using the FACS system. An LC-MS/MS method to identify
most of the amino acids (Glycine, Alanine, Serine, Proline, Valine, Threonine, Cysteine, Leucine,
Asparagine, Glutamine, Lysine, Glutamate, Methionine, Histidine, Phenylalanine, Arginine, Tyrosine &
Tryptophan) and lactate has been standardized which works optimally for even 0.2 million CD8+ cells
and around 1 million CD4+ cells. The lab is now working towards method development for the
detection of TCA intermediate metabolites, lipids, and proteins from less than 0.5 million single-type
immune cells.

“A discovery must be by definition, at variance with existing

knowledge.” — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi