Renu Wadhwa
"Indian Ayurvedic herb-Ashwagandha for cancer treatment"

Position

Head, Cell Proliferation Research Group
Biomedical Research Institute
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology (AIST), Japan

Profile

Dr. Renu Wadhwa had her first Ph. D. from the Guru Nanak Dev University, India and the second Ph. D. from the University of Tsukuba, Japan.

She had her post-doctoral training at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, England and RIKEN Japan.

She has been working in Japan for last 23 years and has been leading a research team working on the mechanisms of cell proliferation controls at the Biomedical Research Institute, AIST, Japan.

Her major research interest is to understand the molecular mechanism of aging and cancer using normal and cancer cells as model system. She had originally cloned a novel member of hsp70 family protein in 1993 and named it “mortalin”. Since then she has made several original findings describing the functional characteristics of this protein and its role in cancer and age-related disorders.

Her group has also cloned a new protein CARF, Collaborator of ARF in 2003 that was shown to regulate p53-p21 tumor suppressor pathway and plays a key role in regulation of senescence and malignant transformation of human cells.

She has more than 190 publications in International peer reviewed journals with many invited/plenary talks in international conferences.

She has been in Editorial board of several scientific journals including Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences and Mechanism of Ageing and Development.

As honorary academic positions, she has served as Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Professor at the Yonsei University College of Medicine (Seoul) and presently has positions of Honorary Scientist at the Children’s Medical Research Institute (Sydney) and Adjunct Professor at the Hanyang University (Seoul).

Recently, she has been awarded the Fellow of Geriatrics Society of India (FGSI) at the 10th International Conference on Geriatric Care held on November 16-17, 2013, Delhi.

Research Interests

Molecular mechanisms of stress, cellular senescence, immortalization and carcinogenesis - basic and interventional studies.