Dr.Karunagaran HOD, IITM Department of Biotechnology.

Dr. Karunagaran is a Professor at the Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. He started his career as a lecturer in Biochemistry at the PSG college of Arts and Science, Coimbatore in 1979 and taught a number of BSc and MSc students for more than a decade.He has made significant contributions in the field of signal transduction, mediated by epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFRs) and their ligands implicated in the development of human cancer.

A novel concept proposed by him (with Dr. Yosef Yarden from Israel) is that ErbB-2 (the second member of EGFR family) acts as the preferred heterodimeric partner of all the known members of the EGFR family, and at least, part of the transforming ability of an over expressed ErbB-2 is due to transactivation of growth factor signaling.