Anusmita Sahoo received Bachelor of engineering in the field of Biotechnology from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra in 2009. She obtained her PhD in Molecular Biophysics from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2015 under the supervision of Professor Raghavan Varadarajan. Prior to joining IIT Kanpur in September, 2022, she completed her post-doctoral training under Professor Rama Rao Amara’s lab in Emory National Primate Center, Emory University, Atlanta, where her research focussed on designing HIV-1 vaccines and monitoring their efficacy in preventing infection in animal models including non-human primates.

Increase in viral diseases caused by arbovirus in different parts of India demands work towards understanding the cause leading to the spread and developing effective vaccines to reduce the disease burden and healthcare expenditure. The vision of our research is to engineer proteins as cross-reactive vaccine candidates against different emerging viral pathogens, including but not limited to, alphavirus (e.g., chikungunya) and flavivirus (e.g., dengue) by computational and combinatorial biology. We aim to work on design strategies to improve stability of the vaccine candidates and monitor efficacy in preventing disease in model organisms, including non-human primates (NHPs). The primary goal of the lab is to translate the successful designs into clinical trials. The lab intends to undertake collaborative and interdisciplinary research to understand the evolution and escape of virus in presence of immune pressure. The interactions between the Fc region of immunoglobulin G (IgG) and various Fc receptors (FcRs) present on immune cells generate effector functions necessary to control the disease and produce cytokines which further shape the disease severity. In this regard, our research also focusses to understand the crosstalk between cytokines and glycosylation profile of antibodies, and their influence in vaccine efficacy and disease severity.