Nagasuma Chandra

Nagasuma Chandra is an Indian structural biologist, biochemist and a professor at the department of biochemistry of the Indian Institute of Science. She is known for her studies on Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded her the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for her contributions to biosciences in 2008.

Biography
Nagasuma Chandra, born in the south Indian state of Karnataka, completed her undergraduate (BPharm) and post-graduate (MPharm) studies at the Bangalore University and moved to the UK from where she secured a PhD from the University of Bristol in 1992. She did her post-doctoral work at the Molecular Biophysics Unit (MBU) of the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) from 1992 to 1997 and joined IISc as a research scientist the same year. A year later, she became a faculty of bioinformatics of the institute where she holds the position of a professor. At IISc, she has set up a systems biology and computational biochemistry laboratory, popularly known as Chandralab, and hosts several research scholars. She also serves as a faculty at the National Network for Mathematical and Computational Biology, an educational agency funded by the Science and Engineering Research Board of the Government of India.

Legacy
Chandra's research focus is in the fields of computational systems biology, cell modeling and structural bioinformatics and she leads a team of scientists who are involved in research in areas such as systems biology, computational immunology, structural bioinformatics and drug discovery. She has carried out studies on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative pathogen of tuberculosis, with special emphasis on their metabolic processes and, along with M. Vijayan and K. Sekar, two of her colleagues at IISc, has developed system models which has helped identify new drug targets against the disease. In 2017, the team led by her identified three drugs namely Ebselen, Vancomycin and Phenylarsine oxide that could be used in combination with Isoniazid, the principal antibiotic used against tuberculosis, to treat the drug-resistant strains of the pathogen. The team discovered that the three drugs lowered the antioxidant levels in the bacterium and thereby destroyed its drug-resistance. Her studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and ResearchGate, an online repository of scientific articles has listed 297 of them. She has also delivered invited speeches at various seminars and conferences.

Awards and honors
The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded her the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards in 2008.