Dr. Santosh Chauhan
Dr. Santosh Chauhan has been awarded the Sun Pharma Science Foundation Research Fellowship for Medical Sciences (Basic Research) for contributing significantly to understanding the mechanisms by which autophagy maintains immune homeostasis under basal and disease conditions. His work has generated new knowledge that could be harnessed to develop new therapeutic formulations to prevent inflammatory, viral diseases, and cancer.
Dr. Chauhan group for the first time showed the molecular mechanism by which IRGM, a protein that is genetically linked with several inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, controls the inflammasomes, interferons, and NF-κB and keeps inflammation under-check. They showed that IRGM suppresses gut inflammation to protect from inflammatory bowel disease in mice model. Also, they have provided a strong proof-of-concept including in an animal model that suppressing IRGM expression results in the broad antiviral state in cells including for SARS-CoV2, ZIKA virus, and Chikungunya virus, and thus, IRGM could be a strong candidate for anti-viral drug discovery.
Also, his work in cancer biology field revealed novel driver proteins that are crucial for cancer progression and tumorigenesis and could be targeted for anti-cancer therapy.
Prof. Ravinder Goswami,
Dr. Ravinder Goswami has been awarded the Sun Pharma Science Foundation Research Fellowship for Medical Sciences (Clinical Research) for his contribution hypocalcemic endocrine diseases in our country. The studies have applied importance of immediate relevance from the public health point of view in our country.
Dr. Ravinder Goswami is Professor in the Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism at AIIMS, Delhi since 1998. He is a leading investigator and has carried out significant clinical research in the field of Endocrinology in our country.
He has provided lead information on prevalence and causes of vitamin-D deficiency in India despite abundance of sunshine, predisposition and cause of osteomalacia and rickets in females, assessment of bio-adaptation at vitamin-D receptor level and an easy and practical vitamin-D supplementation schedule in India. In idiopathic hypoparathyroidism, he has contributed in understanding the pathogenesis of this disease, identifications of novel clinical symptoms and signs modifications of its treatment protocol, and ex-vivo bio-models of its salient complications i.e. ‘basic ganglia calcification’.
Prof. Ruchi Anand
Prof. Ruchi Anand has been awarded the 2023 Sun Pharma Science Foundation Research Award for Pharmaceutical Sciences, for her significant research contributions in the realm of new therapies to combat drug resistance towards design and development of new drugs.
Her research focuses on understanding antibiotic resistance and developing therapies to combat it. In her pursuit of understanding resistance determinants, Prof. Anand focused on discovering novel drug targets and drugs that can successfully “reverse resistance”. For instance, she has been involved in developing drug candidates that inhibit select pathogenic ribosomal methyltransferases. These enzymes are present in drug resistant bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus strains, where they posttranslational modify the protein synthesis machinery, the ribosome, in the cell rendering the bacteria resistant to several different antibiotics. In particular she focused on erythromycin methyltransferases which methylate a select adenine base on the bacterial ribosome and renders them resistant to more than 50 different macrolide, linconamide and streptogramin class of drugs. To address this challenge, she identified a unique allosteric pocket in these enzymes and successfully uncovered selective compounds that inhibit function of these enzymes. She has also been involved in developing modified antibiotic conjugates that bypasses the resistance mechanism and allows these antibiotics to complete inhibit the methyltransferase pathway. This breakthrough reinstates sensitivity to existing antibiotics, effectively "reversing resistance." Her investigation further extends to the efflux mechanisms of antibiotics in multidrug-resistant bacteria, where her goal is to develop inhibitors for tetracycline receptor class of efflux pumps. Through structural biology and concerted fields, she revealed insights into allosteric relay, providing essential information for the design of effective efflux pump inhibitors.