Affiliation: University of California San Diego, School of Medicine, Department of Pathology

Dr. Soumita Das’s research program involves understanding the three-way cross-talk between gastro-intestinal epithelial cells, immune cells, and microbe/microbial products (beneficial as well as pathogenic). Her expertise lies in microbial pathogenesis, host innate immune responses, and human and animal models of infection and inflammation. She has been working on the host-microbe interactions of gastroenteric infection for more than 15 years and her research experience includes identification of Vibrio cholerae transcripts following infection, gastric epithelial cell responses and the cross-talk between luminal antigen and T cells during Helicobacter pylori infection; the interaction between gut microbes and host engulfment pathway in macrophages that affects the host immune responses and chronic inflammatory diseases. In collaboration, in collaboration she has also examined the effect of smoking and vaping on the heart and lungs. For the last eight years, she is involved in the research-training program with undergraduate, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. Her lab recently developed the organoid-in-a-dish model comprising epithelial cells, immune cells, and microbes that can be utilized to identify biomarkers and to screen drugs for infection and inflammatory diseases. The core expertise of her lab is biochemistry, epithelial biology, microbiology, and mucosal immunology. In collaboration with UCSD faculty members, they have also initiated the HUMANOID™ CoRE, a Human organoid-based Center of Research Excellence at UC San Diego, where Dr. Das is the Faculty Director.

Her lab expertise lies in the isolation of primary cells from tissues, generation of organoids from tissue-derived adult stem cells, and their subsequent use in the creation of polarized monolayers (resembling the epithelial barrier in physiology) for use in disease modeling. For example, to model a disease accurately, organoids in 3D or as monolayers are often co-cultured with microbes (bacteria or viruses) that are associated with chronic diseases, with/without stromal (fibroblast, endothelial cells, etc.) and immune cells.