Dr Swastika Sur, Department of Surgery, University of California San Francisco, USA
Dr Sur completed her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from Creighton School of Medicine, Omaha, NE, USA, where her work was focused on understanding the pathophysiology behind inferior patency of venous grafts compared to that of the arterial grafts post bypass surgery. Dr Sur identified Polo like kinase-1 as a target that positively contributes to the development of intimal hyperplasia post cardiac bypass surgery or intervention. Her career goal is to become a translational researcher with an emphasis on rare genetic disorders. She has been primarily working on MRCG-HRB funded project on cystinosis & autophagy in Dr Sarwal’s lab at UCSF for the last three years. During her postdoctoral training under Dr. Sarwal, she identified a pivotal role for vacuolar- ATPase regulated, pH-dependent, intracellular injury pathways that appear to be common in the kidney proximal tubule and the testis in patients with nephropathic cystinosis. She has been involved with projects using multiplex single-nuclear/cellular RNA sequencing, spatial proteomics, and data analytics. She has successfully created immortalized CTNS knockout human renal cell lines with CRISPR/cas9 technology that mimics cystinosis-mediated renal pathology. Currently, her work is focused on creating an in-lab model that can mimic cystinosis-mediated infertility and can be used to enhance our knowledge to find a drug target for cure or to protect male fertility.