Turning genes on and off can be fate-changing, says researcher

CHENNAI, February 23, 2014

Updated: February 23, 2014 03:53 IST

Ramya Kannan

Special Arrangement Ganesh N. Pandian (centre) with his team in his lab in Japan.

A Chennai-based researcher is part of team that has provided proof of the concept that turning on and turning off genes — a process if validated in therapeutics — will be “fate-changing.”

Ganesh N. Pandian lived nearly all his life in Chennai, and went to D.G. Vaishnav college and IIT, Madras, before he went to the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), Kyoto University, Japan, for his PhD. But he stayed on to do more than that, landing himself in the middle of a game-changer project.

“We are trying to give silent genes a voice by turning them on. We are working on the premise that by re-programming or resetting cells, it might be possible to cure disease,” he says.

“Human beings are essentially shaped by their genetic coding. When a genetic programme gets corrupted, disease ensues. We then try to re-programme some of the genes using our approach.”

While the actual research methodology is couched in complex scientific terminology, Dr. Ganesh tries to whittle it down to the basics: “In our research, we activated a gene that is usually silent, but (when) expressed, inhibits the growth of HIV. This sort of gene can be called a therapeutic gene, and its mutation or non expression results in disease.”

What his team has done is to make an artificial switch, a policing process that controls gene expression, to turn genes on or off, in order to cure certain conditions. It is also able to tweak certain genes in such a manner as to reset the cell function: for instance, turn skin cells to nerve cells, or change skin cells to pluriporent stem cells.

Just consider the implications of this: If someone is able to over express a certain gene, it would be theoretically possible to reset the body condition from a cancer state to a normal state. “Of course it really is early stages, yet. But we have proof of concept that this is possible,” Dr. Ganesh says. The response to the research findings, globally, has been pretty good. One of the papers from the project was also published in the January 2014 edition of Nature.

Dr. Ganesh, who is now Premium Assistant Professor at the Institute, wants to share credit with his team that includes four other Indians, Vaijayanthi Thangavel, Abhijit Sahal, Anandhakumar Chandran, Syed Junetha, with graphics support from Sekar Latha, and a Japanese student Junichi Taniguchi. The team is hoping to establish collaborations with Indian research institutions, he adds.

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