Professor Indraneel Mittra MBBS, PhD. (London), FRCS (England), is the Dr. Ernest Borges Chair in Translational Research and Professor Emeritus, Department of Surgical Oncology at the Tata Memorial Centre / ACTREC.
Professor Mittra is a multi-faceted personality: a surgeon, a basic research scientist and a public health researcher. As a surgeon he pioneered breast cancer surgery as an independent discipline in India. In the field of public health, he was the principle investigator of one of the largest randomized trials of screening for early detection of breast and cervical cancer involving 150,000 women in a study that lasted for 20 years. The results, which have been published in high impact journals, have shown that simple techniques such as visual infection of the cervix after local application of 4% acetic acid reduces mortality from cervical cancer by 31%. The breast cancer component of the study showed for the first time that clinical breast examination reduces mortality in women above the age of 50 by nearly 30%. If applied globally in low and middle income countries these two simple techniques have the potential of saving more than 100,000 lives every year. Professor Mittra’s laboratory research has led to the discovery that cell-free chromatin particles released from dying cells are horizontally transferred to healthy cells wherein they cause DNA damage by integrating into their genomes. These findings have far-reaching implications for a multitude of human disorders including ageing and cancer. His current interest has also included evolutionary biology and the origin of life. His research has shown that horizontally transferred cell-free chromatin particles function as autonomous “predatory” genomes and vehicles of transposable elements once they enter into new host cells. These findings have led to the hypothesis that a cell simultaneously harbours two genome forms that function autonomously: one that is inherited (hereditary genome) and numerous others that are acquired (predatory genomes). The presence of predatory genomes has evolutionary implications given their ability to generate a plethora of novel proteins and to serve as vehicles for transposable elements.
