After completing my postdoctoral training, I decided to pursue a career in clinical research and trials. Currently working as Senior Clinical Scientist, Clinical Development, Immunology at the CSL Behring.

During my postdoc training, I worked on clinical trials happening within the Department of Infectious Diseases, at Stony Brook University.  I worked on 2 clinical trials with outside sponsors and 5 internally sponsored clinical research programs.

Prior to joining CSL Behring, I worked as Scientist designated as PI with KCAS Biomarker and Bioanalytical Services managing client programs, especially concerning immunogenicity assessments, including fit-for-purpose assays development (especially TBNK panels) and clinical site training.

As a Clinical Scientist, I bring forward my experiences from my research, clinical study execution experience, and project management skills to bridge preclinical and translational research with clinical science.

During my PhD training at UNMC I became aware that immunocompromised individuals are very prone to get hospital-acquired infections (HAI) that affect their recovery period and can also cause death in them. 

A very common HAI infection is caused by carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae that causes lung and urinary tract-infections in these sick patients. Since, drug-resistant K. pneumoniae is difficult to treat and approximately 60% immunocompromised patients infected with K. pneumoniae die due to complications. There are parallels present between the mechanisms employed by infectious agents like Klebsiella and cancer cells to escape the immune system therefore, I got interested in delineating the commonalities. 

The strong connection and requirements to find a therapy to treat K. pneumoniae infections in my host country United States as well as my home country India has been a strong reason for me to pursue my postdoctoral training at Dr. Bettina Fries's lab in Stony Brook University. 

My postdoc research was focused on developing therapeutic antibodies and vaccines against carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae. The research led to 2 first-author publications, a review publication, and a provisional patent filing through VA Northport.

I follow companies and scientific groups that work on developing vaccines and/or antibodies against capsules of multi-drug resistant bacteria.

My doctoral thesis work focused on developing cancer immunotherapeutics for pancreatic cancer. My research characterized and investigated the therapeutic efficacy of Mucin (MUC) based cancer vaccine.

Firstly, I detected circulating autoantibodies to a tumor specific protein called MUC4 present in PC patients, suggesting that MUC4 is immunogenic in PC and thus could be targeted for PC immunotherapy. 

In the second part of the dissertation that is summarized in my research article accepted in Cancer & Genes, I characterized MUC4 nanovaccine in both in vitro and in vivo system. Our studies showed that MUC4 nanovaccine could robustly activate immune cells and induce secretion of anti-tumor cytokines in vitro cell culture experiments. 

Further, in in vivo subcutaneous PC tumor mouse model we observed enhanced immune cells infiltration and corresponding levels of necrosis in human MUC4-expressing tumors that corroborated with low tumor volume of miniMUC4 tumor (in comparison to contralateral vector control tumor) in MUC4-immunized mice (published in Cancer Research 77 (13 Supplement), 3678-3678 and presented at AACR Annual Meeting). 

I am interested in new immunotherapeutic approaches in oncology, especially cancer vaccines, tumor immunology and tumor microenvironment.