Head, Early-life Microbial Immunology
PhD
Dr. Archita Mishra leads the Early-life Microbial Immunology Group at Telethon Kids Institute. Her lab focuses on the role of the microbiome in early-life immune development. She completed her PhD at IISc Bangalore, India, earning the INSA Young Scientist Medal for her work on novel drug targets in Tuberculosis (Mishra et. al. EMBO Mol Med, 2018).
For her post-doctoral work she moved to Singapore Immunology Network, ASTAR, to work with a world-leading immunologist Prof. Florent Ginhoux. Dr. Mishra was awarded the prestigious and highly competitive HFSP long-term fellowship to conduct her post-doctoral research.
Her pioneering work demonstrates the presence of healthy microbes during fetal development and their role in priming of the immune system early in development (Mishra et al. Cell 2021). Dr. Mishra’s work opens a new field of research exploring the role of microbiome in immune priming and early-education during the perinatal period of human development.
Dr. Mishra started her laboratory at Telethon Kids Institute in the year 2022 and established the 'Early-life Microbial Immunology' program. She was awarded Raine-BrightSpark Fellowship for her work on Microbiome and Immune development in Early-Life. Her lab employs advanced technologies like Microbial genomics, single-cell approaches and Spatial Transcriptomics to study microbial-immune interactions and their effects on childhood infections, allergy, response to vaccination and cancer.
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Publications
April 2024
Symbiotic symphony: Understanding host-microbiota dialogues in a spatial context
Modern precision sequencing techniques have established humans as a holobiont that live in symbiosis with the microbiome. Microbes play an active role throughout the life of a human ranging from metabolism and immunity to disease tolerance. Hence, it is of utmost significance to study the eukaryotic host in conjunction with the microbial antigens to obtain a complete picture of the host-microbiome crosstalk.
Published research Early Life Microbial ImmunologyJanuary 2024Presence of onco-fetal neighborhoods in hepatocellular carcinoma is associated with relapse and response to immunotherapy
Onco-fetal reprogramming of the tumor ecosystem induces fetal developmental signatures in the tumor microenvironment, leading to immunosuppressive features. Here, we employed single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics and bulk RNA sequencing to delineate specific cell subsets involved in hepatocellular carcinoma relapse and response to immunotherapy.
Children's Cancers Published research Early Life Microbial ImmunologyApril 2023Immunosuppressive mechanisms of oncofetal reprogramming in the tumor microenvironment: implications in immunotherapy response
Both fetal and tumor tissue microenvironments display immunosuppressive features characterized by the presence of specific immunomodulatory stromal and immune cell populations. Recently, we discovered shared microenvironments between hepatocellular carcinoma and fetal tissues and described this phenomenon as an oncofetal ecosystem.
Children's Cancers Published research Early Childhood DevelopmentOctober 2022Identification of distinct functional thymic programming of fetal and pediatric human γδ thymocytes via single-cell analysis
Developmental thymic waves of innate-like and adaptive-like γδ T cells have been described, but the current understanding of γδ T cell development is mainly limited to mouse models.
Published research Neonatal Health -
Education and Qualifications
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Awards/Honours