Prof Swagata Halder aims to pursue research in the area of DNA damage response to develop novel therapeutic interventions against cancer. His laboratory expertise lies in Molecular Cell Biology and in vitro Protein Biochemistry.
He earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford, UK, under the supervision of Prof Kristijan Ramadan. During his DPhil research, Prof Halder, along with his colleagues, discovered a new human synProfome, now known as SPARTAN synProfome or Ruijs-Aalfs synProfome. This discovery led to the further characterization of the SPRTN protease in the DNA-protein crosslink repair pathway and subsequently established why SPRTN deficiency leads to premature ageing and early-onset liver cancer.
Prof Halder pursued his postdoctoral research as a scientist at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), Bellinzona, Switzerland, at Prof Petr Cejka's laboratory. By utilizing in vitro biochemistry, Prof Halder has demonstrated how breast cancer susceptibility protein BRCA2 protects stressed replication forks in a RAD51-dependent manner and showed why a single cancer-associated mutation in BRCA2 renders these cells sensitive to DNA-damaging agents (e.g., PARP inhibitors). His work additionally addressed some key fundamental questions in the DNA repair field and paves the way for further research in this rapidly emerging and therapeutically important field.
Prof Halder has received the Goodger-Schorstein Research Scholarship in Medical Sciences, University of Oxford, and the Doctoral Transition Innovation Award from the European Institute of Innovation, Technology and Health, a body of the European Union. He is also a recipient of the EMBO Long-Term Fellowship. His research has been published in prestigious scientific journals like Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, Molecular Cell, Nucleic Acids Research, Scientific Reports, and Chemical Science.
View Prof Halder's complete list of publications here:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=I1ieueUAAAAJ&hl=en