Autophagy and Metabolism: Potential Target for Cancer Therapy

Dr. Dhruv Kumar is a Senior Associate Professor at School of Health Sciences and Technology, UPES University, Dehradun, India and his current research is focused on autophagy, cancer cell metabolism, tumour microenvironment, exosomes, mutational heterogeneity, cancer prevention, drug designing, NGS and COVID-19. After completion of B.Sc. in Chemistry from Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from University of Allahabad, India, he has completed his Ph.D. in Cellular, Molecular and Industrial Biology from the University of Bologna (UNIBO), under highly prestigious fellowship, Indo-Italian Government fellowship. After his Ph.D., he obtained Postdoctoral training at the University of Kansas Medical Center, USA. During his Postdoctoral training, he worked towards understanding the molecular mechanism(s) of autophagy regulation and apoptosis in cancer stem cells (prostate, pancreatic and breast), focusing on the metabolic cross-talk between the tumour microenvironment (cancer associated fibroblast (CAF)) and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) via HGF/c-MET and bFGF/FGFR signalling pathways. He has also worked on structure based drug designing for several cancers, COVID-19, mutational heterogeneity in cancer. Currently, his lab is focusing on metabolic heterogeneity in solid tumours and structure based drug designing for cancer and COVID-19. He has published more than 100 research articles, reviews and book chapters in reputed journals.

Shailendra Asthana is a Senior Scientist at Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), India. He has more than 20 years of research experience in drug discovery, autophagy, and bioinformatics. The goal of his research is to improve atomic level understanding of protein-ligand, protein-nucleic acid, protein-peptide and protein-protein interactions using computational models and tools. Using molecular modeling, molecular docking and physics-based methods such as molecular dynamics simulations, Dr. Asthana and his research group focus on how small molecules interact with proteins and thereby modulate their function.