Assistant Professor of Surgery
Director of the Diabetes and Transplant Immunobiology Laboratory
Pratima received her Bachelors degree in Chemistry and her Masters degree in Biochemistry from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India (1989 and 1991, respectively). Since then, she has been working diligently to find a cure for diabetes.
Her research focus is to understand the mechanism of development of spontaneous type 1 diabetes. This is an autoimmune disease caused by destruction of islet cells by autoreactive T cells. In healthy individuals, immune cells are responsible for clearing viral and bacterial infections and self tissues are protected by tolerizing T cells reactive to self proteins. In autoimmune diseases, such as diabetes, tolerance of self protein-reactive T cells is disrupted allowing these activated T cells to attack self tissues and lead to destruction and autoimmune disease. The precise mechanisms involved in breaking of self-tolerance are not clearly elucidated. Pratima is working on identifying the mechanisms involved in disrupting T cell tolerance. Therapies that aim at blocking T cell activation or promoting T cell tolerance will be desirable in reversing diabetes as well as in protecting islet and pancreas grafts in transplant patients.
The studies that Pratima has initiated will help us understand how to control destructive T cells from killing islet cells. Such therapy would be useful in preserving the remaining intact islet mass in newly diagnosed patients. Recent efforts to alleviate the complications of diabetes and restore sustained normoglycemia have led to islet transplantation. However, to prevent the transplanted islets from T cell assault, patients need to be maintained on long-term immunosuppressives. For islet transplantation to become a reality as viable therapy for diabetes, immunosuppression- associated side effects, such as increased risk of malignancy and opportunistic infections, need to be reduced. Her efforts to identify molecules that would specifically silence T cells that destroy the islets while keeping rest of the beneficial immunity intact, would be extremely useful in islet transplantation.
Pratima became personally involved in diabetes research after watching her father, who has type 1 diabetes, develop an increasing number of complications from the disease. She understands the problems that people with type 1 diabetes and their family members face. As an immunologist, she also fully understands the lacuna in our understanding of the disease process and the frustrations of developing a better cure of this debilitating disease. Pratima is committed to finding a cure for type 1 diabetes. Her research is funded by a grant from the American Diabetes Association. She believes that through consistent work done by herself and her colleagues at the Diabetes Institute for Immunology and Transplantation, we will be able to understand the disease and develop relevant therapies for intervention which will greatly help patients around the world, like her father.
Curriculum Vitae (.doc)
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