Dr. Soumya Basu started her scientific career with B.Sc. degree in Physics (Hons.), Chemistry and Mathematics (2001) and M.Sc. degree in Microbiology (2003). She joined Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, Dr. D. Y. Patil Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Institute as an Assistant Professor in 2014. She is a Principal Investigator in Cancer and Translational Research Laboratory and currently managing 1 extramural (DST) and 3 intramural projects. Her research work focuses on targeted anti-cancer therapy and she closely works with her bioinformatics and medicinal chemist partners. Apart from her research responsibilities, she is also involved in teaching, both theory and practical courses in cell biology, physiology and immunology to graduate students. Before joining Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, she was a Research Associate at ACTREC, Kharghar, Navi Mumbai and worked on designing a BRET based genetic sensor for monitoring in vivo dynamics of caspase-3 activation. In 2008, Soumya joined Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, Kolkata, as a senior research fellow in an ICMR funded project and obtained the PhD degree in Life Sciences in 2012 from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her work during this period has been published in 7 different international journals. During her PhD work, she had designed different possible anti-cancer agents as mitochondria targeted therapy in drug resistant cancer and extensively studied their mechanism of action, both in vitro and in vivo. She worked as a UGC project fellow from Jan 2006-Jan 2008, where her work was on “Synthesis, biological evaluation and quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) study of glutamine analogs as possible antitumor agents” at Department of Pharmaceutical Technology, Jadavpur University. This work resulted in publication of 5 papers in different international peer reviewed journals. In 2005, she joined as a project Fellow in Dept. of Biophysiscs, Molecular Biology & Genetics, University of Calcutta to work on a small project entitled “Study of amino acid networking within proteins”.

Research in the laboratory is focused on various aspects of cancer biology at the molecular level. Specific research areas include (a) Design, synthesis and evaluation of novel structural analogs of natural products as a selective anti-cancer agent, (b) Cancer Stem Cells and (c) Mechanism(s) of chemoprevention by Lactobacillus sp. in colon carcinoma