Lekhika Pathak joined KaviKrishna Lab in the year 2018 and has completed her Ph.D. from IIT Guwahati in October 2024 under the guidance of Dr. Bikul Das and Dr. Sanjukta Patra from IIT Guwahati. Since then, she is working with Dr. Das to complete several research projects related to stem cell niche defense. During her PhD, she used in vitro, animal and clinical methods to study the role of stem cell niche defense in Tuberculosis (TB) and Cancer dormancy.
She worked for four years as a senior research fellow in a DBT (Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India) funded grant to study the role of stem cell altruism in TB dormancy and reactivation. Her first-author research article “Coronavirus Activates an Altruistic Stem Cell - Mediated Defense Mechanism that Reactivates Dormant Tuberculosis” published in 2021 in ‘The American Journal of Pathology’ was selected by Elsevier journal for press release in more than 200 global news platform including eurekalert.
Her second first author paper published in Frontiers Immunology has demonstrated the utility of a novel in vitro organoid model to isolate and study circulating cancer stem cells obtained from patients with head and neck cancer.
Her third first author paper (under preparation) delineate the whole genome sequencing profiles of bacteria recovered from circulating progenitor cells grown in a special in vitro system developed by Dr. Das to study stem cell-pathogen interaction, and published in Science Translational Medicine. For these clinical projects, she closely worked with Dr. Das’s clinical teams to reorganize the KaviKrishna Telemedicine Care.
Since 2018, she received extensive training in cancer and TB patients care as a clinical officer. As a part of her research, she worked in the Community Medical program and instrumental in the community based participatory research (CBPR) in the Sualkuchi-Hajo cultural complex with the philosophy, economics and medical humanities students of KaviKrishna centre of Indian Knowledge System.
She has presented her research work in various national and international conferences including the SITC, BOSTON. She has been selected for the first round of Full Bright Scholarship.
In addition to the research work, Lekhika played key role in the training of undergradutate/graduate students (provided training to more than 70 undergrad students for summer internship), and served as the CEO of the laboratory, and received extensive experience in capacity team building to take forward the lab vision of CBPAR based biomedical research.
