Page 10 - CSIR-IGIB Annual Report 2020-21

IGIB scientists are also engaging in research to target pathogenic organisms directly. Skin infection
caused by Propionibacterium acnes has been observed to harbour antimicrobial resistance. Hemant
Gautam’s lab is involved in genome based characterization of P. acnes. To overcome challenges imposed
by AMR, his lab is developing antibacterial photothermal therapy using chitosan-coated Prussian Blue
nanoparticles. Pradeep Kumar’s lab has been working on development of various polymeric
nanoconjugates as efficient antimicrobials. Here he reports the development of polydopamine-
aminoglycoside conjugates with high efficiency against drug resistant strains. Rajesh Pandey’s lab has
started a program on genomics based understanding of host and pathogen during infection, making
important contributions in detecting evolution of SARS-Cov2 genome.

Computational tools are being used and developed at IGIB to not only understand basic biology but also
provide solutions to critical healthcare issues. Lipi Thukral’s lab uses computational biology to
understand protein structure-function relationship at the atomistic level. Here she reports on the
structural understanding of autophagy proteins LC3 and GABARAP, and SARS-CoV2 variants using
atomistic level MD simulations in the membrane. Debasis Dash reports on the development of RAPID-
CT which is an artificial intelligence based tool for detection and diagnosis of Intracranial Hemorrhages
from computed tomography data. Along similar lines, his group developed CovBaseAI for the detection
and diagnosis of COVID-Pneumonia from Chest X-rays. Abhay Sharma reports using transcriptome data
analysis for predicting drug prioritization against COVID-19. S Ramachandran’s lab reports on the use of
gene co-expression analysis to generate a network of pathways present in diabetes that may enable
prediction of disease progression and treatment.

This report also brings our attention to the way in which a team of scientists at IGIB worked towards
finding solutions to the incident threat of COVID-19. Starting from preparedness and initial protocol
development for diagnostics by Sheetal Gandotra, Vivek Rao, Sridhar Sivasubbu, and Vinod Scaria, to
scaling up by Mohamad Faruq and Sridhar Sivasubbu’s teams, to development of a pooling based
strategy for sequencing viral genomes by Vinod Scaria and Sridhar Sivasubbu’s teams, to deployment of
point of care sequencing technologies by Rajesh Pandey’s team at critical places like airports, IGIB
covered all bases for nucleic acid based detection of the virus. Emanating from the very research that
was ongoing on the development of FnCas9 at IGIB, together with Debojyoti Chakraborty’s lab, Souvik
Maiti’s team developed a CRISPR based diagnostic for COVID19 which can be adopted on a lateral flow
platform in future. There was realization that nucleic acid based detection is temporal and other means
of detecting infection may be necessary to understand the exposure levels in the country. Under the
leadership of Anurag Agrawal and Shantanu Sengupta, a country-wide serosurvey, partnering with all
CSIR labs across the country was undertaken. This first-of-a-kind undertaking was crucial in informing
the evolution of the pandemic across different cities.

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