Dr. Ena Ray Banerjee is Associate Professor of Zoology in University of Calcutta, India and an alumnus of the premiere educational institutions Lady Brabourne College and Gokhale Memorial Girls’ school. She was trained in Immunobiology during her PhD and worked extensively in immune modulation in inflammation in general and cytokine mediated inflammation in particular. Having taught both under- and post-graduate Zoology as lecturer under University of Calcutta, India, for several years, she pursued her post-doctoral studies as visiting scientist and subsequently faculty of University of Washington, School of Medicine, Seattle, USA. There she began with immunological studies defining key molecules in inflammation and eventually super-specialized into lung inflammation particularly allergy and made a natural transition onto regenerative medicine of the lung, having worked with one of the foremost scientists in stem cell biology, Professor Thalia Papayannopoulou and a renowned allergist Dr. William R. Henderson, Jr. Her work pioneered tissue engineering of lung lineage specific cells of the non-ciliated variety from human embryonic stem cells and identified stem cell niches in mouse lung. She returned to India and worked for a while in a drug discovery company Advinus Therapeutics, a TATA enterprise, where she led in vitro and in vivo efforts in pharmacological molecules, drug discovery in asthma and related respiratory illness, and then returned to academics as Reader in her alma mater, the renowned University of Calcutta. Her group works on drug discovery efforts using novel drugs (small molecules), herbal extracts (functional food), probiotics (nutraceuticals), novel antibody-mediated (camelid antibody) and cells (tissue engineering of stem cells of embryonic origin, adult tissue origin and umbilical cord-derived) in inflammatory disease models (tissue specific inflammation in the lung and systemic inflammation) and degenerative disease models. She has publishedwidely in premiere scientific journals and her publications are widely cited in “methods” volumes as well as “drug discovery” websites and portals.
