Associate Professor
Department of Biological Sciences
📍 AB2 4F6
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Research Area
Cell Biology of Viral Infection
Research Interests
How does a virus enter its host cell to deliver its genetic information during infection? To enter a target cell, a virus has to critically depend on the conserved cellular pathways and factors as it lacks any locomotory apparatus. In our lab, we focus on how some medically-important viruses including influenza A virus, SARS-CoV-2 and dengue virus exploit the host machinery and cues for intracellular trafficking, breaching membrane barriers, and unpacking their capsids for genome release. Understanding viral entry mechanisms is of paramount importance in antiviral research as viral entry represents an ideal target for intervention strategies to prevent infection early on. Moreover, as different viruses depend on just a limited number of cellular entry pathways, blocking these pathways by silencing the activity of the pathway-specific host factors can broadly inhibit multiple viruses, thus greatly expanding our currently limited antiviral portfolio. Using interdisciplinary approaches and employing a variety of techniques including high-content RNAi and small molecule screening, CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing, advanced microscopy, transcriptomics and proteomics, we seek to advance our understanding of viral entry mechanisms at the cellular and molecular levels, and illuminate potentially valuable host targets and host-directed molecules to develop novel antiviral strategies.
Since 2021 : Editor (Virology), Current Clinical Microbiology Reports (Springer)
Since 2023 : Associate Professor, IISER Mohali
2017 - 2023 : Assistant Professor, IISER Mohali
2012 - 2017 : Novartis Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI Basel) and Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR), Switzerland
2011 - 2012 : Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Biochemistry, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Switzerland
2007 - 2011 : Ph.D., Molecular Life Sciences Graduate Program, Institute of Biochemistry, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Switzerland
2005 - 2007 : M.Tech., Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, India
2023 : Scientific High-Level Visiting Fellowship from the Embassy of France in India and BIOSANTEXC Discovery Program
2016 : Pfizer Prize in Immunology and Infectious Diseases
2012 - 2016 : Presidential Fellowship, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research
2007 - 2011 : Ph.D. Fellowship from the Molecular Life Sciences Graduate Program, Zurich
Ahammed A Thottasseri, Gaganpreet Kaur, Deepthi Ramesh, Indranil Banerjee and Tharanikkarasu Kannan. Morpholinodiazenyl chalcone blocks influenza A virus capsid uncoating by perturbing the clathrin-mediated vesicular trafficking pathway. Archiv der Pharmazie, 2024. Nirmal Kumar, Irshad Maajid Taily, Charandeep Singh, Sahil Kumar, Raju S Rajmani, Debajyoti Chakraborty, Anshul Sharma, Priyanka Singh, Krishan Gopal Thakur, Raghavan Varadarajan and others. Identification of diphenylurea derivatives as novel endocytosis inhibitors that demonstrate broad-spectrum activity against SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus both in vitro and in vivo. PLoS Pathogens (19(5):e1011358), 2023. Kajal Gupta, Gaganpreet Kaur, Tejal Pathak and Indranil Banerjee. Systematic review and meta-analysis of human genetic variants contributing to COVID-19 susceptibility and severity. Gene 844(146790), 2022. Suchitra S Prabhu, Trirupa Tapas Chakraborty, Nirmal Kumar and Indranil Banerjee. Association between IFITM3 rs12252 polymorphism and influenza susceptibility and severity: A meta-analysis. Gene 674:70–79, 2018. Indranil Banerjee, Yasuyuki Miyake, Samuel Philip Nobs, Christoph Schneider, Peter Horvath, Manfred Kopf, Patrick Matthias, Ari Helenius and Yohei Yamauchi. Influenza A virus uses the aggresome processing machinery for host cell entry. Science 346(6208):473–477, 2014. Indranil Banerjee, Yohei Yamauchi, Ari Helenius and Peter Horvath. High-content analysis of sequential events during the early phase of influenza A virus infection. PloS one 8(7):e68450, 2013.