Ranjan Nanda

Current Focus Areas

• Anemia of inflammation in Tuberculosis: Role of iron chelators in improving tuberculosis pathophysiology and their importance as host directed therapeutics is the focus.

• Immunosenecence and tuberculosis: Aging increases susceptibility to different diseases including tuberculosis and show higher reactivation and disease severity. Monitoring immune cell distribution of aged lungs and upon Mtb infection will identify important cell types. Correcting immunosenescence in geriatric tuberculosis patients might significantly improve treatment outcomes and lower death rate.

• Type 2 diabetes mellitus and tuberculosis: Diabetes increases susceptibility to tuberculosis and cause adverse treatment outcomes but we have limited understanding on the mechanisms involved in the disease susceptibility. Understanding on the compromised immunity in diabetes is critical to develop therapeutics for these co-morbid TB patients.

• Alveolar type-II epithelial cells and tuberculosis: Alveolar epithelial cell lines (A549) are infected with Mycobacterial strains or clinical isolates to undertake metabolomics and flux balance analysis (FBA) to monitor the crucial biochemical changes. Manipulating the metabolic pathways critical for host bacterial clearance might be useful for efficient pathogen elimination.

• Gut microbiota dysbiosis in tuberculosis: Using metagenomics we aim to identify the important beneficial microbes in the tuberculosis patients which might be supplemented with anti-tuberculosis drugs for better recovery.