Research Projects

Metabolic-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) or Non-alcholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a chronic progressive disease arising from fat buildup in the liver leading to its inflammation, fibrosis, and cirrhosis. Liver histology is currently the reference standard for diagnosing and assessing disease progression, but biopsies are invasive and difficult to perform in steatotic patients because of health risk besides being prone to subjective variation in pathological interpretation. Despite its high prevalence, with every third adult in India suffering from MASLD, there is a lack of robustly validated biomarkers for prognosis, diagnosis, and continuous monitoring of disease progression or regression. With the advent of high-throughput genomics, we can characterize gene expression levels and associated regulatory states in individual celltypes across multiple donors. While a number of transcriptomic studies have been performed on MASLD patients, there have been no attempts at systematically characterizing and validating reproducible biomarkers associated with MASLD-induced pathogenicity across studies and individuals. My research group will perform large-scale analysis of single-cell RNA and open chromatin datasets to identify functional, reproducible, and validated biomarkers for MASLD.