dr Sivakumar Vadivel Gnanasundram (French Institute of Health and Medical Research)

Speaker: dr Sivakumar Vadivel Gnanasundram (French Institute of Health and Medical Research)

Time: 16th November 2018, 9:00 am

Venue: Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology, Abrahama 58, hall 042

Dr. Gnanasundram finished his Master’s degree in Microbiology from the University of Madras, India in 2008. He then moved to Indian Institute of Science, India as a Research fellow and worked on novel anti-viral therapeutics using small RNAs targeting Hepatitis C virus RNA translation. For his doctoral degree he enrolled into HBIGS, Heidelberg University, Germany where he worked on Ribosome biogenesis pathway and RNA helicases. He completed his doctoral degree in 2014.  For his post-doctoral work he moved to Dr. Robin Fåhraeus group at INSERM, Paris, France.

His present work involves in understanding the oncogenic mechanisms of the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-encoded EBNA1. It has been known for over 50 years that EBV is a human oncogenic virus responsible for app. 2-3% of all cancers but unlike other oncogenic viruses, the underlying molecular oncogenic mechanisms of EBV have largely remained obscure. Transgenic mice models have shown a reverse correlation between the expression of the EBNA1 protein and a lymphoma phenotype. Why less of an oncogenic protein would give more cancer could not be explained until now. It turns out that EBNA1 suppresses its own synthesis in cis in order to minimize the production of antigenic peptides for the MHC class I pathway and thereby helps the virus to evade the immune system. His work that is recently published in Nature Communications shows that the stress caused by this suppression of translation leads to the activation of E2F1 and the induction of c-myc. We speculate that the virus is exploiting a cellular pathway whereby cells senses dysfunctional mRNA translation and compensates by inducing ribosomal biogenesis via c-myc.