Translational Virology (Formerly known as Department of Communicable Diseases) was established in 2016 with the focus areas on priority viral diseases such as Dengue, Chikungunya and Respiratory Syncytial virus of public health importance to India.

Our research group focuses on several aspects of viral diseases such as disease surveillance, genomic characterization of viruses, immunity to natural viral infections and pathogenesis. Additionally, our group works on vaccine development, vaccines evaluation and antiviral screening of drugs or healthcare products.

We did extensive work on the evaluation of adjuvants for augmentation of immune response of candidate Chikungunya vaccine in mice. The group is also working on development of VLP based RSV candidate vaccine funded by DBT -Wellcome India Alliance.

With the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 in year 2020, our group initiated the SARS-CoV-2 research in collaboration with Bharati Vidyapeeth Medical College & Hospital, Pune. We have repository of SARS-CoV-2 strains, Wuhan, Kappa, Delta and Omicron from clinical samples.

In last 5 years, ten different projects were sanctioned from extramural funding agencies like, ICMR, DBT, NBM-BIRAC, GSK etc. and in return, 38.35 crore funding was generated.