New Innovators Award winner works to answer maternal immunity questions

A La Jolla scientist and assistant professor’s work on maternal immunity is getting a crucial $1.5 million boost thanks to an award for up-and-coming researchers.

Deepshika Ramanan, who joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 2023, was the recent recipient of the New Innovators Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, connected to the National Institutes of Health.

Ramanan said she was ecstatic when she heard of her award this summer.

“I’m just starting out,” said Ramanan, a researcher of 15 years, including six years earning her Ph.D. “I know how competitive it can be, and I was extremely excited to get it.”

The NIAID award aids early-career investigators in pursuing lines of research that are deemed both creative and innovative. The grant will give Ramanan and her team a total of $1.5 million over five years, delivered in yearly installments of $300,000.

Ramanan, a member of the Salk Institute’s NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis, studies immune changes that occur throughout pregnancy and breastfeeding.

“My lab is generally interested in maternal offspring immunity,” Ramanan said. “And part of this stems from the fact that milk is the first food that, as mammals, we all receive.”

Ramanan’s interest in the subject grew when she was pregnant with her first child. She realized how little is known about the immune cells in breast milk, even relative to the ingredients of many other foods.

“Honestly, you know more when you walk into a store and you pick up food,” Ramanan said. “There’s labels for everything and you know more about what’s in any of those foods than we do about what’s in this first food that’s fundamental to life.”

Breastfeeding is known to benefit infant development and immunity while holding the capacity to reduce the mother’s risk of breast cancer, Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, according to the Salk Institute.

Ramanan is seeking to understand the science behind those trends. She also hopes to find alternatives for mothers who can’t breastfeed and offer insight on dietary decisions that can improve the production and quality of milk.

“It shouldn’t be that only women who get pregnant and breastfeed can get this benefit,” Ramanan said. “I think it’s important that we find out what this benefit is and what is causing the benefit so we can hopefully help women who choose not to get pregnant or breastfeed.

“We want to understand the basic biology, which eventually down the line will help address some of these questions.”

A study released by Ramanan’s lab in the scientific journal Nature Immunology on July 29 concluded that there are plenty of T cells in the mammary gland of mice while pregnant or breastfeeding, some of which relocate there from the gut. Similar cells were found in human milk. T cells are a type of white blood cells that help protect the body from infection and disease by targeting specific threats.

The researchers believe the process is similar to how intestinal tissue is supported, study first author and graduate student Abigail Jaquish said at the time of the study’s release.

For the next phase of research, Ramanan’s lab proposed further exploration of mastitis, a common infection during breastfeeding.

Several questions remain to be answered or clarified through more research: Is there a perfect mix of microbes for pregnant and breastfeeding women? Could the connection between the intestines and mammary gland point to the importance of dieting? Do T cells work with other immune cells to impact the process of milk production?

Ramanan’s team consists of two Ph.D. students, one research assistant, two undergraduate students and a lab administrator. She said the new grant helps meet their essential needs and empowers them to continue their research.

“It helps pay for my team, for their salaries, [and] helps pay for a lot of the [substances] we’re using for this [research],” Ramanan said. “And every year the cost just increases … so we absolutely need grants like these to help us move our research.”

Ramanan said the team aims to accomplish its research goals by the time the grant expires, but she added that “for every successful experiment, you also have to realize there’s a lot of failed experiments and you have to do a lot of troubleshooting. So it’s hard to predict. But of course I’m an optimist, so I’m going to say that, yeah, I’m hoping we can have this done in the next five years.”

Ramanan also has received several other honors in the field of maternal immunology, including the Rita Allen Foundation Scholar Award and the V Scholar Award from the V Foundation for Cancer Research.