Biography
After receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Bose Institute at the University of Calcutta, India, Dr. Ganguly completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Dr. Ganguly's post-doctoral work was in cell biology and the mechanism of drug resistance to microtubule-targeting drugs. After completing his post-doctoral training, he joined the faculty of the University of Calgary, Canada, where his research shifted from cell biology to cellular immunology. He primarily worked on the mechanism of immune suppression by dendritic cell immune paralysis. Using single-cell force spectroscopy and super-resolution microscopy, he found that regulatory T cell adhesion to dendritic cells causes sequestration of Fascin-1, an actin-bundling protein that is essential for immunological synapse formation. Furthermore, Dr. Ganguly found that this process is reversible upon regulatory T cell disengagement. Importantly, this sequestration of critical cytoskeletal components causes dendritic cells to adopt an inactive state, leading to reduced T cell priming. The finding was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. In Canada, his research was funded by CIHR (Co-I) and Alberta Lung Association (Co-PI).
Dr. Ganguly joined the University of Michigan in 2019. In his past two years of collaboration with Dr. Clifford Cho, the lab has made significant progress in understanding how a novel mode of focused ultrasound-mediated tumor ablation (histotripsy) initiates a downstream systemic anti-tumor immune response. The findings have been published in BME Frontiers, Cancers, and the Journal of Immunotherapy for Cancer. The lab plans to expand this line of research to dissect the crucial mechanisms involved in histotripsy-induced immunomodulation. Since 2022, Dr. Ganguly's research has been funded by the University of Michigan and the Department of Veteran Affairs.