S Kumar Lab
Parkinson’s Disease
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic progressive second most common neurodegenerative disease worldwide. Till date, no effective treatment to arrest disease progression and has huge burden on health care system. The main reason is the loss of dopaminergic neurons leading to dopamine depletion. One of the reasons for the wide variations in prevalence rates is the lack of proper diagnostic tools to detect in the early stages where they may be more effective to halt disease progression. Our aim is to extract, characterize and validate the exosomes from the patients sample and develop a non-invasive method to correlates the exosomes level with disease severity. This target to be a potential cost effective novel biomarker for diagnostic approaches.
Breast Cancer
Breast cancer is a major global health issue. It has the highest rate of incidence and is the second major cause of mortality in women. It causes extensive individual suffering and gives a huge burden on the health care in society. Despite extensive research and different tools have been developed to assist clinicians in selecting patients who should receive adjuvant therapy, it still remains a challenge. While current searches for markers involved further processing of the cancer patient samples involving costly reagents such as specific antibodies, no reagent and special sample preparation is required for FTIR imaging make this technique very economical. This technique gives information on chemical changes that started with the initiation of disease, hence help the clinician for early detection and increased the rate of survival. The long term purpose is to further develop infrared biomarker based methodology for other cancer and neurodegenerative disease.
Aging & Neurodegeneration
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory demyelinating disease where the insulation of axons (myelin) is damaged due to an immune mediated mechanism. This disrupts the communication between the brain and the rest of the body. Current research suggests a significant role for the oxidative stress in the pathogenesis of demyelination and neurodegeneration in MS. Remyelination accompanied by resolution of inflammation contributes to the clinical recovery or remission. Our aim is to investigate the role of oxidative stress in MS shadow plaques using IR-microspectroscopy & immunohistochemistry.
Biomineralization
Sharma, Vaibhav, Alagiri Srinivasan, Ajoy Roychoudhury, Komal Rani, Mitali Tyagi, Kapil Dev, Fredrik Nikolajeff, and Saroj Kumar. 2019. “Characterization of Protein Extracts from Different Types of Human Teeth and Insight in Biomineralization.” Scientific Reports 9 (1): 9314.