Profile
My research goals are focused towards understanding disease pathophysiology of liver-specific manifestation of metabolic dysregulation including diabetes, insulin resistance, etc. My group works towards designing and validating MASLD-related phenotypic assays and use them to screen small molecules as well as herbal extracts to identify candidates for lead development. Drug discovery efforts in my laboratory explore the possibility of delaying the disease progression through prophylactic efficacy studies in rodents or curing the disease through curative approach. My team is also interested in understanding molecular mechanisms of hepatic metabolic dysregulation and its effect on other vital body organs including kidney by working closely with interdisciplinary teams including computational and mathematical modelling experts. Overall goal is to enhance our understanding of fatty liver disease and generate better screening models to augment the ongoing efforts towards better and efficient drug discovery in NAFLD management.
Current Focus Areas
Understanding disease pathophysiology of liver-specific manifestation of metabolic dysregulation
Selected Publications
1. Babele P, Midha MK, Rao KVS, Kumar A. (2023). Temporal profiling of host proteome against different M. tuberculosis strains reveals delayed epigenetic orchestration. Microorganisms, 11(12), 2998. 2. Sarkar S, Kumari D, Gupta SK, Sharma V, Mukhi S, Kamboj P, Sasibhushan V, Rai RK, Sastry JLN, Mahajan D, Kumar Y, Kumar A, Dikshit M. (2021). Saroglitazar and Hepano treatment offers protection against high fat high fructose diet induced obesity, insulin resistance and steatosis by modulating various class of hepatic and circulating lipids. Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy, 144, 112357. 3. Gupta A, Kumar A, Anand R, Bairagi N, Chatterjee S. (2021). Genome scale metabolic model driven strategy to delineate host response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. Molecular Omics, 17, 296-306. 4. Duggal S, Jailkhani N, Midha MK, Agrawal N, Rao KVS, Kumar A. (2018). Defining the Akt1 interactome and its role in regulating the cell cycle. Scientific Reports, 8: 1303. 5. Kumar A, Gupta V, Chaudhary M, Singh A, Sehajpal PK. (2014). Depleted TGF-β₁ levels in end stage renal disease patients from North India. Gene, 534: 440-443.