Indian scientist awarded Rs 14.7-cr grant

An Indian scientist has been awarded a grant of Singapore dollars 3 million (about Rs 14.7 crore) by the National Research Foundation (NRF) to work on congenital and adult cardiovascular diseases. Dr Manvendra K. Singh, an Assistant Professor in the cardiovascular and metabolic disorders programme at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, hails from Gorakhpur.

The NRF is a department within the Singapore Prime Minister’s Office. It is mandated to chalk out strategies, policies, and plans for research, innovation, and enterprise.

Singh said he that is one of the seven young scientists from across the world to be endowed with the NRF fellowship to carry out cutting-edge research this year. His research area is congenital and adult heart diseases, the leading causes of mortality worldwide, he added. In Singapore, for instance, such ailments caused 30 per cent of the total deaths in 2014.

“Our laboratory studies the molecular mechanisms that regulate cardiovascular development, homeostasis, and disease. Our goal is to understand how signaling pathways and transcriptional networks regulate cardiovascular cell lineages differentiation and their interaction during heart morphogenesis,” he said. “Our work aims for better understanding of congenital human diseases of the heart by establishing mouse models for these disorders and delineating the molecular changes associated with them.”

After doing M.Sc. (Biotechnology) from the Madurai Kamaraj University, he joined the MD/PhD program in Molecular Medicine at Hannover Medical School, Germany. He was awarded PhD from Hannover Biomedical Research School, Germany.