Gaurav Chopra

Title:

Assistant Professor

Contact:

Email Address: gchopra@purdue.edu
Office Phone: 765-496-6108
Lab Website Link: http://www.chopralab.com/

Primary Training Group:

Computational and Systems Biology

Secondary Training Groups:

Chemical Biology

Current Projects:

The theme of my laboratory is Chemical Immunology. We are interested in understanding and chemically perturbing immune microenvironments in disease (cancer and neurodegeneration). We use immunological, synthetic, and proteome-scale methods to discover, design, synthesize and verify immunomodulatory chemical entities that are specific to immune cell subtypes (e.g. MDSCs, microglia, astrocytes, etc). We have developed a novel interactome based drug discovery and design platform that analyze compound-proteome interaction signatures at the genomic (proteomic) scale to determine drug behavior, in contrast to traditional single target approaches. We use machine learning to develop ‘computational assays’ to complement and guide chemical synthesis and biological experiments done in our laboratory and identify targets/networks to design drugs/combinations for specific cellular phenotype ex vivo and in vivo. My group and our collaborators have used this approach to identify putative drug leads (new synthetic leads, combination of existing drugs) using in vitro and in vivo preclinical studies for more than 10 different diseases including cancer, immunological, metabolic, infectious and genetic indications (castration resistant prostate, invasive bladder cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, type 1 diabetes, dental caries, dengue, herpes, drug resistant tuberculosis, etc). The two research themes of my lab in “data-driven chemical methodology” and “cell-specific chemical immunomodulation” will help us achieve our goal to develop immunomodulators (small molecules, cell conjugates, etc) that may be used therapeutically, as well as, “probes” to perturb immune microenvironments to explore cell-responsive pathways in different diseases.