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Principal Investigator

Dr. Amit Dutt

Principal Investigator

Honors and Recognitions

  • 2023 Tata Innovation Fellowship Award by Department of Biotechnology, Govt of India
  • 2022 Featured among top 75 scientists of India, across all disciplines, shaping the future of the country by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India.
  • 2018   YIM Boston Young Scientist Award 2018
  • 2017   Distinguished Alumni Award, conferred by the Vice Chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia,
  • 2017   Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology 2017 in Medical Sciences
  • 2011   Wellcome Trust/ DBT India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship
  • 2010   Ramalingaswami Fellowship Award, Department of Biotechnology, Govt of India
  • 2005   Awarded Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral fellowship, Switzerland

Research Interests

The Dutt laboratory focuses on understanding the genetic changes that occur in human cancer cells and how these changes can help develop the next generation of effective targeted therapies and diagnostics to improve treatment of cancer patients, using innovative computational and functional approaches.

RESEARCH

The goal of Dutt laboratory is to understand the somatic genetics of human cancer and help develop the next generation of effective targeted therapies to improve treatment of cancer patients. The group specifically focuses on the genomic features of genetic alterations underlying oncogenesis and cancer progression in the lung, breast, cervical, gallbladder, head and neck, and others cancers. The efforts involve using advanced sequencing methodologies followed by functional validation to study the implications of genetic alterations in identifying novel cancer dependencies, therapeutic strategies, and biomarkers.

Cancer Genomics: Using computational approaches we analyze genome wide alterations underlying the cancer genome such as point mutations, complex structural alterations, and aberrant transcript fusion and expression. We develop robust in-house automated computational pipelines and analytical tools to analyze the high throughput datasets generated by whole exome, transcriptome and genome sequencing such as Waterhose, ClinOme, Cancer Pathogen Detector, HPVDetector, DepRanker,RVD, COVID qPCR Analyzer and others. We recently developed TMC-SNPdb - the first Indian germline SNPdb.

Functional Genomics: The genome-discovery efforts made in the laboratory are paired with functional validation using biochemical, molecular, cell based experimental approaches, and transgenic mouse models. We perturb the candidate target genes using CRISPR-Cas system and perform genome wide pooled shRNA screen using tumor derived cell lines to complement and validate our findings from genomic approaches. Specifically, the lab focusses on EGFR, FGFR and NOTCH family pathways.

Pathogen Discovery: We have developed a computational pipeline, HPVDetector to detect the presence of HPV DNA sequences in human clinical cancer samples. Next we used a similar aproach to detect the presence of non-typhoidal Salmonella in gallbladder cancer. We are currently expanding our endeavor to explore the presence of several other pathogen sequences in the human cancer genome using Cancer Pathogen Detector (CPD), an improved version of the computation pipeline. Simultaneouly, we are in process to deploy the CPD application as a “Container” onto the host cloud system (like CGC) using Docker system.

Ongoing Research Projects

  • A model depicting the action of progesterone in breast cancer.

    Identifying the Targets of Progesterone in Human Breast Cancer

    A randomized study carried out at Tata Memorial Centre showed a disease-free and overall survival benefit for pr… more

  • project1

    Characterization of long non-coding RNAs in human breast cancer

    Pre-operative progesterone treatment confers survival benefit to node-positive breast cancer patients. Our recen… more

  • Integrative analysis to understand the mechanism of hormone therapy resistance in breast cancer

    Integrative analysis to understand the mechanism of hormone therapy resistance in…

    Breast cancer is most common cancer in India. Of the total incidence of breast cancer in India, about 50 percent… more

  • Oral Cancer

    Integrated analysis of Head and Neck squamous cell carcinoma: A genomic approach

    Tongue cancer is the most predominant form of oral cancer in developed countries with varying incidence in devel… more

  • Differential expression profile of tongue squamous cell carcinoma using mRNA sequencing and meta-analysis identifies MMP10 up regulation.

    Identification and characterization of potential biomarkers to predict metastasis…

    Nodal metastases status among early stage tongue cancer patients (pT1-pT2) plays a decisive role for choice of t… more

  • Drug-sensitive FGFR3 mutations in lung adenocarcinoma

    Discovery of therapeutically relevant alterations in human genome - a functional g…

    Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer related deaths across the globe. According to the Globocan, arou… more

  • The schema for identification of novel resistance mechanisms using primary tumors from EGFR mutated non-small cell lung cancer patients

    Understanding the complexities of human lung cancer genome

    Treatment with tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) is the standard of care for lung cancer patients positive for m… more

  • CT scan images of chest of EGFR mutant lung adenocarcinoma patient before and after treatment with Gefitinib

    An Integrative Approach to understand Resistance to Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors in…

    Lung cancer resistance is the major obstacle to targeted therapies involving tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI). I… more

  • project1

    Establishing cell-free nucleic acid as diagnostic and monitoring tool in non-small…

    Treatment of cancers like NSCLC has revolutionized in the last decade owing to the identification of driver muta… more

  • Heatmap of mutations in adenocarcinoma and squamous carcinoma subtypes of cervical cancer and SGOL plot for copy amplification genes of cervical cancer

    Genome-wide approaches to characterize novel genetic elements causing cancer

    The area of my research is to characterize the genomic landscape of somatic alterations in cervical cancer from… more

  • In vivo sensitivity of gallbladder cancer cell lines to EGFR inhibitor

    Genomic approaches to discover novel oncogenes in human cancer

    The uncommonness of gallbladder cancer in the developed world has contributed to the generally poor understandin… more

  • project1

    Characterization of therapeutically relevant alterations in human cancer

    We are exploring the genomic landscape of papillary thyroid cancer and medullary thyroid cancer in Indian patien… more

  • Pathogen-derived signals modulate numerous hallmarks of cancer through diverse mechanisms

    Genomic approaches to identify novel endogenous and exogenous genetic elements ass…

    Cancer is a complex disease characterized by somatic alterations (genetic and epigenetic), pathogenic infections… more

  • project1

    Integrative biology of genome, epigenome and pathogens in huma

    Pathogenic infections have been associated with cancer worldwide. About 18-20% of the malignancies have been att… more

  • Overall schema of Waterhose

    Waterhose: a GUI based automated computational tool to analyze cancer genome datas…

    We have developed a fully automated, robust computational pipeline called Waterhose, for analysis of high throug… more

Lab Members

Alumni

PUBLICATIONS

Contact

Office Contact

Dr. Amit Dutt

Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Int Fellow ACTREC, Tata Memorial Centre Navi Mumbai, 410 210 INDIA+91 (022) 2740 5000/ 6873 5000 Extn-5056 adutt@actrec.gov.in Lab Website

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