Highlights
- Dr Anupriya Aggarwal’s team at UNSW analyses COVID variants, including Delta from hotel quarantine
- Dr Aggarwal migrated to Australia in 2004, did Ph D at University of Sydney
- The Kirby Institute team is also studying efficacy of vaccines on COVID variants
Led by Associate Professor Stuart Turville at the Kirby Institute, a UNSW research team uses genetically supercharged cells to quickly understand the dynamics of different variants of the coronavirus, test their ability to evade vaccines and inform public health response in real time.
A part of this team is Anupriya Aggarwal, an alumni of Punjab University in northern India, whose job is to engineer these cells and put them to work.
“I am a part of this highly skilled and competent team of researchers at Kirby Institute which has leveraged its expertise in the field of HIV research to make a significant contribution against SARS-CoV2,” Dr Aggarwal told SBS Hindi.
“Within this team, I am responsible for genetically engineering the cells to express the SARS-CoV2 receptors and undertaking the experiments to investigate protective responses against the virus,” she added.
Dr Aggarwal migrated to Australia with her family in 2004 after receiving her postgraduate degrees in biochemistry from Punjab University, Chandigarh.
“I did my Ph D from the University of Sydney in 2011 and thereafter, started working as a post-doctoral researcher at Kirby Institute. I am a part of Associate Prof Stuart Turville’s team within the Immunovirology and Pathogenesis Program at Kirby Institute,” she added.
At the institute’s laboratory in Sydney, her team has led the development of novel methodologies for high throughput screening of antivirals and neutralising antibody responses against existing and emerging SARS-CoV2 variants.
Dr Aggarwal in PPE to work in the lab. Source: Supplied by Anupriya Aggarwal
“We are a small team which has managed to achieve all this in a relatively short period of time of almost six months,” Dr Aggarwal added.
“We have genetically modified human kidney cells to express SARS-CoV2 receptors and developed a unique cell line that is hyper-permissive to the virus.
“In other words, these cells are highly-sensitive and can detect even small amounts of ‘live’ virus in patient samples,” Dr Aggarwal said.
“Using these specially-engineered cells, we have successfully isolated and characterised 12 new and emerging virus variants including the Delta variant from hotel quarantine samples,” she elaborated.
Currently, the team is also studying the efficacy of vaccines and convalescent responses, for example, natural immunity after people recover from their infection from these variants.
Dr Aggarwal at the Kirby Institute lab. Source: Supplied by Anupriya Aggarwal
Earlier this week, Australia's leading immunologist and Nobel Laureate Dr Peter Doherty retweeted a time-lapse video that sheds light on how COVID interacts with the healthy cells in bats infected with the virus.
“We have recently developed a novel method that can detect these ‘protective antibody’ responses in a very short period of time. Generally, these kinds of tests can take up to four days but with the highly-sensitive cells, we can get the results overnight,” she added.
“As a result, we are now able to screen hundreds of patient samples and antiviral compounds rapidly and with higher sensitivity than previously possible.
“We will continue developing and refining the techniques above and ensure we can continue to work and contribute to the global effort of finding viable solutions to the current pandemic,” Dr Aggarwal said.
Her team’s work outlining the immune response against SARS-CoV2 has been recently published in a prestigious peer-reviewed science journal, PLOS Medicine.
“We are currently finalising another study which compares our novel approach against more established methods in the field,” Dr Aggarwal concluded.
