Subhankar (“Subho”) is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Innate Immunity and Regenerative Medicine within the School of Immunology & Microbial Sciences; where he is based within the Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology & MRC centre for transplantation. Before joining King’s, he worked as a Senior Staff Scientist at Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK; and held an independent Wellcome Trust fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Boston USA. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology on innate immunity and macrophage biology. Prior to this, he completed his first-class Honours and Master’s in Human Physiology from the University of Calcutta, India.

His research covers broad areas of innate immunity, inflammation biology and host-pathogen interactions with a specific focus on macrophage immunobiology and its activation. His research unravelled novel mechanisms of macrophage activation identified regulatory pathways that limit excessive macrophage activation and showed how the imbalance between macrophage activation and regulation contributes to various inflammatory pathologies. More recently, he is using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) as a model system to study cellular and molecular mechanisms of various immune-mediated diseases.

His group has developed methods for differentiating human induced pluripotent stem cells into various innate immune cell types (macrophages, dendritic cells and neutrophils) and organotypic cultures such as 3D intestinal organoids. Using genetically engineered iPSCs or iPSCs generated from a rare patient with immunodeficiency or inflammatory disorders his group is trying to understand the mechanism of how specific human genetic mutations influence innate immune response and disease pathogenesis.

Subho was trained by a number of world-leading scientists at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard; he has published his research in top ranking international journals and received a number of prestigious studentships, fellowships and international awards from scientific societies.  He has a strong commitment towards training and mentoring of the next generation of scientists and always welcome informal enquiries from prospective students and postdoctoral trainees.