Rentala Madhubala

Biography

Our Research is on Kala-azar, a major public health problem endemic in parts of India. We are following a four pronged approach to eliminate this scourge: develope a drug to treat it, identify biomarkers for drug resistance in clinical isolates, devlope a vaccine to prevent it and identify the mechanism of host-parasite interaction. We have identified novel drug targets like vitamin c biosynthesis pathway, aminoacyltRNA synthetases, hypusine and glyoxalase pathwa. We have worked out the mechanism of resistance in clinical isolates to antimonials and also to paromomycin drugs commonly used for the treatment . We have recently developed a genetically attenuated live parasite deficient in making ascorbic acid. These attenuated parasites were potent imunogens and act as a virulence factor by modulating host immune responses. These live attenuated parasites were found to be good vaccine candidate against visceral leishmaniasis (Mol. Microbiology, 2014, Nature Scientific Reports, 2015). we for the first time demonstrate the novel regulatory role of host microRNA, MIR30A-3p in modulation of host cell autophagy after infection with L. donovani. Our work shows that the host-MIR-30A-3p could be a potential new biomarker for L. donovani infection (Autophagy, 2016)..

Research Interest

Molecular Parasitology, Functional genomics