Indian American Microbiologist Lalita Ramakrishnan Awarded 2024 Robert Koch Prize
- A professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Cambridge since 2019, she receives the award for her pioneering research investigating the molecular mechanisms behind tuberculosis.
Indian American microbiologist Lalita Ramakrishnan has been awarded the 2024 Robert Koch Prize, in recognition of her pioneering research investigating the molecular mechanisms behind tuberculosis. She has been professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Cambridge since 2019, where she is also a Welcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and practicing physician. She conducts research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and is head of the Molecular Immunity Unit in the Department of Medicine there.
The Robert Koch Award is awarded annually to recognize outstanding researchers for their internationally acclaimed scientific accomplishments, the foundation says. Supported by the German Federal Ministry of Health, the award is one of the most prestigious scientific prizes in Germany and dates back to 1960.
This is the first time since 2007 and the fourth time in the history of the award that a woman has received the accolade alone, according to the foundation.
“We are honored to recognize Prof. Dr. Lalita Ramakrishnan, a top scientist who is doing pioneering work in tuberculosis research,” says Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Plischke, chairman of the Robert Koch Foundation. “The disease is still one of the main causes of death, even though a live attenuated vaccine has been available for a century and effective antibiotics have been available for 60 years.”
Ramakrishnan is at the forefront of modern tuberculosis (TB) research worldwide. She has developed important tools to study the disease, the foundation notes, “most notably a robust zebrafish model that has led to groundbreaking insights into the interactions between bacteria and host during infection.” Her team has used this knowledge to develop new treatments for TB and shape clinical research. She discovered that ‘the need for months of treatment with multiple drugs to cure tuberculosis arises because actively growing bacteria in the host’s macrophages, which are white blood cells called phagocytes, activate efflux pumps that ‘pump out’ the antibiotics, promoting bacterial survival,” the foundation noted.
Ramakrishnan’s research into TB has “huge global importance given that the disease continues to be a major cause of death in many countries, despite the effective prevention and treatment options provided by vaccines and antibiotics,” the foundation said. Alongside malaria and AIDS, tuberculosis is the most common infectious disease worldwide, and ranks 13th on the list of the most common causes of death. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around ten million people contract tuberculosis every year and around 1.5 million people die from it.
In 2018 and 2019, Ramakrishnan co-authored two influential articles in the British Medical Journal in which she argued that the widely accepted estimates of the prevalence of latent tuberculosis – which serve as the basis for the allocation of research funding – are far too high. She began her research career by completing medical training in India, before moving to the US to complete a Ph.D. in Immunology and medical residency training at Tufts Medical School in Boston. Following this, she went on to a clinical Infectious Diseases Fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, and then a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University where she began her TB studies. In 2001, she joined the University of Washington, where she pioneered using zebrafish to model TB pathogenesis.
Ramakrishnan moved to Cambridge in 2014, where alongside her roles at the LMB, and the Molecular Immunity Unit, she also serves as Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Medicine, a Principal Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust, and an Infectious Diseases Consultant at Cambridge University Hospital. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, EMBO, and the American Academy of Microbiology. She was recently awarded the Gardner Middlebrook Lifetime Achievement Award in Mycobacterial Research
Ramakrishnan will receive the Robert Koch Prize at an awards ceremony on Nov. 8 in Berlin.