Centre for Disease Biology
The CDB is envisioned as an interdisciplinary centre that will focus on improving the understanding of pathogenesis and spread of infectious diseases, its effects on non-communicable disease and on designing policy interventions appropriate for India.
- Emerging (including vector-borne) Infectious Diseases
- Human Immunology (including studies on vaccines)
- Antimicrobial Resistance
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in clinical and epidemiological settings
Centre for Inflammation Biology
The CIB studies the fundamental pathways that regulate inflammation in humans with acute and chronic diseases, including cancers. The aim is to understand the determinants and genetic backgrounds associated with disease severity, and in the longer term, tailor and repurpose better and safer drug regimens for “Indian genomes”.
- Inflammation in Cancers
- Inflammation in Infection
- Triple Negative Breast Cancer
Centre for Inflammation Biology
The CIB studies the fundamental pathways that regulate inflammation in humans with acute and chronic diseases, including cancers. The aim is to understand the determinants and genetic backgrounds associated with disease severity, and in the longer term, tailor and repurpose better and safer drug regimens for “Indian genomes”.
- Inflammation in Cancers
- Inflammation in Infection
- Triple Negative Breast Cancer
Centre for Synthetic Biology
The CSB would be an interdisciplinary centre focusing on the growing areas of synthetic biology, data science and other emerging technologies in biology. Ashoka conceives synthetic biology in its broad sense to include both application of engineering design principles to build new constituents of living cells and adoption of biologically inspired design for metabolic engineering.
The Future of Biosciences
India is home to many endemic infections and has periodic disease outbreaks. More recently, it has the world’s second highest numbers of Covid-19 cases. High population density, increasing demands on land, deforestation and global warming pose additional threats for the emergence of new infectious diseases. Genetic predisposition, changing lifestyles and environmental pollution have also increased the impact of non-communicable diseases such as cancers, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic lung and kidney disease to name a few.
These add to the existing challenges of malnutrition. India faces immense health challenges, and is both vulnerable and a potential source for the emergence of new infections that can have global impact.