Somsubhra Nath

Assistant Professor

Molecular Biology of the cells attracted me since my days of B.Sc. in Zoology honors from Presidency College (not a University then) and later on, M.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Calcutta. Following this, I got trained in the areas of Molecular Biology of cancer cells during PhD from CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology and post-doctoralship from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of Nebraska Medical Centre at Omaha. I started my independent research career from Saroj Gupta Cancer Centre & Research Institute, till joining the Presidency University, in July 2022, from where my lab is pursuing works on ‘Basic and Translational Cancer Research’.The three ongoing focus areas are as follows:

Targeted therapy responsiveness in breast cancer

Endocrine therapy is the most affordable targeted treatment available, so far, for hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer. The triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), lacking the expression of hormone receptors, are not amenable to this treatment. The concerning fact is that TNBC is more prevalent in Asian countries, including India, and moreover, younger onset (frequently below 40 years at time of detection) of TNBC is frequent in this cohort. While for a low-middle-income-country (LMIC), like India, newer treatment options (immunotherapy, PARP-inhibitor) are beyond the reach to a large section, affordable options could be the savior. Previous work from our lab suggested that targeting a hormone-receptor-degrading protein might turn TNBC to restore hormone receptors from untimely decay, thus potentially enabling endocrine therapy. Ongoing works are examining this potential.

Additionally, the previous work of lab dissected a molecular cross-talk between hormone receptor status and cellular ploidy in breast cancer. As augmentation of aneuploidy is being considered as a synthetic lethality for breast cancer, a separate work is focusing on exploring surrogate marker to diagnose cellular ploidy towards implementing the synthetic lethality.

Front-line therapy resistance in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML)

Following exploring the mutational spectrum of BCR::ABL1, the driven onco-protein of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), our recently conducted study concluded regulatory domain mutations behind front-line imatinib-resistance and found out dasatinib as a second-line treatment (under communication). A separate sub-cohort, without any BCR::ABL1 mutation despite imatinib-resistance, is the presently the main focus area of CML team of lab and therapeutics leads for this category of disease are being searched in a bed-side to bench approach.

Ploidy status of breast cancer stem cells

Among the malignant solid tumors, the presence of breast cancer stem cells, also known as tumor initiating cells (TIC), is well documented in breast cancer. These TIC populations are held responsible for disease recurrence and drug resistance in breast cancer. However, existing cancer therapies are unable to target these cell populations.

While aneuploidy is a prominent feature among mature malignant cells, little is known about the background ploidy status of TIC of breast cancer origin. We are searching the ploidy status of TIC populations of breast cancer origin. As augmenting aneuploidy is synthetically lethal for cancer cells, we aim to explore ploidy perturbation of these TIC populations as a mode of their eradication.

Address

Presidency University,
86/1 College Street, Kolkata - 700073,
West Bengal, India

Download CV
Email: somsubhra.ihs at presiuniv.ac.in
alternate E-mail: somsubhra.nath at gmail.com

How to Find Us

Presidency University
(Main Campus)

86/1 College Street
Kolkata 700073

Presidency University
(2nd Campus)

Plot No. DG/02/02,
Premises No. 14-0358, Action Area-ID
New Town
(Near Biswa Bangla Convention Centre)
Kolkata-700156
Contact details Presidency University Students Corner

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