Sonali Chaturvedi, PhD

Postdoc

Leor Weinberger, Gladstone Institutes

Pronouns: she/her

Virus escape is a huge problem in the field of infectious diseases, my lab pioneers in new classes of escape-resistant therapeutics (Chaturvedi et al. Cell 2021 & Chaturvedi et al. Cell 2022; I am co-corresponding author on both the papers). We identify areas of unmet clinical needs for human health and solve the problems using virology, synthetic biology, bioengineering, molecular biology and functional genomics tools paired with biochemistry. I invented two new classes of escape-resistant therapeutics: (i) Therapeutic Interfering Particles for SARS-CoV-2 (Chaturvedi et al. Cell 2021) where the therapy keeps up with the evolutionary pressure of SARS-CoV-2. I reported the discovery of a new class of antiviral, Therapeutic Interfering Particle (TIP) against SARS-CoV-2 that exhibits an exceptionally high genetic barrier to the evolution of resistance. (ii) Exploiting transcriptional feedback circuit to design feedback disruptors (FD) as an escape-resistant intervention for viruses (Chaturvedi et al. Cell 2022). I presented a proof-of-concept data that rational targeting of transcriptional feedback circuits yields 'open-loop lethality' (a new concept introduced here) in the targeted circuit's cells.
These two stories have been highlighted in Cell (Balaszi 2022) and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (Villanueva M T, 2021)

I am also interested in fundamental questions in the field of virology. In Chaturvedi et al., PNAS, 2020, I addressed a 50-year-old question in biology: like how do organisms probabilistically ‘hedge their bets’ to optimize fitness in variant environments? Specifically, the study reveals a bet-hedging mechanism underlying the establishment of viral latency.