Tuberculosis research pioneer Lalita Ramakrishnan joins MRC LMB’s Cell Biology division
A pioneering researcher renowned for her work on tuberculosis (TB) has joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology’s Cell Biology Division as a group leader.
Lalita Ramakrishnan, head of the University of Cambridge’s Molecular Immunity Unit, said she hopes to convince her colleagues of the “awesome power” of the zebrafish, which she uses as a model to study how mycobacteria cause disease by evading and exploiting processes in the host body.
TB was the second leading infectious killer in 2020, after Covid-19, claiming 1.5 million lives, making it the 13th leading causing of death, according to the World Health Organization.
Prof Ramakrishnan uses zebrafish because they are a natural host to Mycobacterium marinum, a close relative of the human TB bacterium.
As the zebrafish is genetically tractable and optically transparent, it can be used to manipulate and monitor infection in real-time.
Such work has shown the genetic basis of susceptibility to TB, and revealed many ways in which mycobacteria manipulate host macrophages, which is their primary host niche.
Novel discoveries that have immediate clinical implications in treating TB have been uncovered through their use.
Prof Ramakrishnan co-authored influential papers in the British Medical Journal in 2018 and 2019 that argued the generally accepted estimates of the prevalence of latent tuberculosis, which is used as a basis to allocate research funds, were way too high.
She said: “Mycobacteria are exquisite cell biologists, having co-evolved with their hosts for millennia.
“I’ve enjoyed informal interactions with many [scientists] in Cell Biology for years and hope to collaborate more closely to understand the cell biology of TB. I also hope to lure my new colleagues into using the zebrafish by showing them its awesome power.”
Manu Hegde, joint head of the LMB’s Cell Biology division, said: “I am thrilled to have Lalita join Cell Biology. We will undoubtedly benefit from her breadth of knowledge across many areas of physiology, infectious enthusiasm, and deep curiosity about every aspect of science.”
Prof Ramakrishnan completed medical training in India, before a PhD in immunology in the US, medical residency training at Tufts Medical School in Boston and a clinical infectious diseases fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She conducted postdoctoral research at Stanfor before joining the faculty of the University of Washington in 2001, where she pioneered the zebrafish as a model for TB pathogenesis.
She joined the University of Cambridge in 2014 in the LMB’s Molecular Immunity Unit, where she is professor of immunology and infectious diseases and principal research fellow of the Wellcome Trust.
Prof Ramakrishnan has remained a practising infectious diseases physician throughout her career and works as anconsultant at Cambridge University Hospitals.
She is a member of US National Academy of Sciences and EMBO, and a fellow of The Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology.
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