Infectious diseases and inflammatory disorders are major contributors to the global burden of disease, thereby having a huge socio-economic impact. Decades of research have unraveled the arsenal of mechanisms by which the host immune system detects an invading microbe and elicit an innate immune response ensuring clearance of the pathogen while exerting a minimal damage to the host. Any failure in this chain could lead to chronic diseases such as Atherosclerosis; as well as devastating conditions like sepsis and sepsis-induced death. It is critical for the host to restore homeostasis and resolve the inflammation upon microbial infections through a collective and meticulous coordination of a number of controlled molecular events such as chromatin remodeling, transcription, translation, post-translational modifications (PTMs) and metabolic reprogramming. The systems inflammation research group aims to specifically study the role of metabolic reprogramming and PTMs (phosphorylation, acetylation and succination) in antiviral signaling and inflammation using state-of-the-art systems-level approaches such as mass spectrometry-based proteomics and metabolomics. Additionally, we employ CRISPR/Cas9-based genome-wide/targeted genetic screens to identify key regulators; upon viral infection such as HIV or Influenza and other inflammatory stimuli. We believe that our basic research-focused systems-level approaches would yield deeper and broader understanding of inflammatory signaling which will have enormous translational potential.

The research group led by Richard K. Kandasamy currently includes 2 Ph.D. students, 4 post-docs and 1 Masters student. We work in close collaboration with CEMIR research groups led by Terje Espevik and Trude H. Flo; as well as Per Bruheim (Department of Biotechnology, NTNU), Denis Kainov (Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine, NTNU) and Geir Slupphaug (NTNU Proteomics Core). Our international collaborators include Kate Fitzgerald (UMASS Medical School, Worcester, USA), Egil Lien (UMASS Medical School, Worcester, USA), Giulio Superti-Furga (Center for Molecular Medicine, Vienna, Austria), Christoph Bock (Center for Molecular Medicine, Vienna, Austria), Andre Muller (Center for Molecular Medicine, Vienna, Austria), Rune Linding (University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark), Keshava Prasad (Center for Systems Biology and Molecular Medicine, Yenepoya University, Mangalore, India), Min-Sik Kim (Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea) and Akhilesh Pandey (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA).