Kanchan Anand (India)
| Hello! My name is Kanchan and I am an Indian, working as a scientist at EMBL Heidelberg. |  |
I used to love going to school! This may seem surprising but the credit goes to my teachers, especially my science teacher, who encouraged me to enter science-competitions and it was a great feeling to win.
From early on, I was fascinated with the idea of working in a lab with interesting people to unravel the secrets of nature. So I always wanted to be a scientist. Towards the end of my degree at Delhi University, while surfing on the Internet I found out that there is an interesting field called X-ray crystallography. This, I decided, was what I wanted to do for a career, so I applied for a position in Germany and within one month, I had moved here.
I started off in Jena, a small university town, where I did my PhD Later our lab moved to Lübeck in the north of Germany - another very beautiful town. It was a very nice experience - the people were very friendly. This time my work focused on corona viruses which are responsible for 35% of common colds and flu. My job as a structure biologist/crystallographer was to determine the structure of the key proteins which play a major role in spreading the virus. We hoped that by understanding the structure, we would be able to find an inhibitor to block virus replication and eventually stop infection. It was a completely new field for me, so it was challenging and exciting, and I needed plenty of encouragement not to give up. After working hard for three years, I eventually solved the structure of the protein and designed a viral inhibitor. This was similar to a drug manufactured by Pfizer, which is effective on the other 65% of common colds.
While I was busy writing all this down for my thesis, the SARS epidemy hit the news. SARS is one of the dangerous members of the corona viruses. The results from our research were urgently needed by the scientific community to produce a vaccine, so I worked day and night with my PhD supervisor to publish the data within one month.
It was an exciting period as we went to many different places including China, where the epidemy started. Thankfully, the situation was soon under control. After my doctorate thesis, I moved on to Aventis Pharmaceuticals for a year. I joined EMBL Heidelberg in 2005 with an EMBO fellowship. EMBL is a great place to do research and meet people. It is a very cosmopolitan environment. Now, I have a Marie-Curie Fellowship to work on HIV, which is the causative agent of AIDS. We are trying to solve the structure of the protein complex that is responsible for the virus replication. Eventually, the aim is to devise an antiviral drug therapy for this devastating disease.