Narinder Kumar Mehra (born 4 November 1949) is an Indian immunologist, head of the department of transplant immunology and immunogenetics of the SRL Limited, Gurgaon. He is a former dean of research and holds the ICMR Dr. C.G. Pandit National Chair at AIIMS. An elected fellow of the International Medical Sciences Academy, The World Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Sciences, India, Mehra is known for his research on histocompatibility and immunogenetics. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Medical Sciences in 1992. He received the Chevalier of the National Order of Merit from François Mitterrand in 2003.
Biography
Born on 4 November 1949 in Amritsar, in the Indian state of Punjab, Mehra did his schooling at Bishop Cotton School, Simla and earned his graduate degree (BSc) with human anatomy, physiology and biochemistry as optional subjects from Government Medical College, Amritsar in 1969 before moving to Delhi to complete his master's degree (MSc) in human anatomy at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi (AIIMS). He continued at AIIMS for his doctoral studies and after securing a PhD in 1975 on the immunology of leprosy, did post-doctoral work on histocompatibility and immunogenetics at the laboratory of Jon van Rood in the Netherlands and later with John A. Hansen at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle. On his return to India, he joined his alma mater, AIIMS, as a pool officer in 1977. In 1979, he was elevated to lecturer with the additional responsibility of the clinical and research activities of the Histocompatibility Laboratory established under the Department of Anatomy in 1977, the year he joined AIIMS. In 1993, the laboratory, which served as the core laboratory in India for workshops on histocompatibility as well as a base for researches on human leukocyte antigen (HLA), was upgraded to a full-fledged department under the name "Department of Transplant Immunology and Immunogenetics", which he headed as its founding chair, in the capacity of a professor and served out his career at AIIMS in that position. He also served as the member secretary of the Research Advisory Council and chaired the Dean's Research Committee (DRC) at AIIMS. At the time of his official retirement from service in 2004, he was serving as the Dean of Research and post-retirement, he holds the Dr. C. G. Pandit National Chair of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) at AIIMS, continuing his research at the institution. Mehra resides in AIIMS Campus, in Ansari Nagar, New Delhi.
Legacy
Mehra, whose research has covered various aspects of histocompatibility and immunogenetics, started his work on the subjects during his post-doctoral days in Europe, and at John Hansen's laboratory in Seattle, where he used DNA-based technologies of HLA analysis to study the immunogenetic aspects of rheumatoid arthritis. Later, in India, he studied HLA-linked genes and identified that a subtype of HLA-DR2 carried a unique class II haplotype which made humans susceptible to diseases such as leprosy and tuberculosis. He also differentiated the Indian rheumatoid arthritis and insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus patients from the Western Caucasian patients by demonstrating that the former showed a pattern of HLA-DR and HLA-DQ association and these studies helped in characterizing the Indian population with regard to its genomic diversity. His group demonstrated that HLA genes with specific pockets in the peptide binding region controlled the severity of mycobacterial diseases, which was a first-time discovery. Together with Ajay Kumar Baranwal of AIIMS Delhi and Brian D. Tait of the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, he carried out a research project, Antibody Repertoire and graft outcome following solid organ transplantation, which assisted in the prediction of graft rejection and had significance in organ and bone marrow transplantation. He also guided a team of scientists in a project based on polymorphic immunomodulatory genes for developing molecular medicine to combat infectious, autoimmune and rheumatological diseases. His research has been published by way of over 450 articles; of which 287 are listed by ResearchGate. Besides, he has published a book, The HLA Complex in Biology and Medicine: A Resource Book, and has contributed chapters to books published by other researchers, including Textbook of Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Allied and Molecular Medicine. His researches have been cited by many authors, too. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi established a Histocompatibility Laboratory under its Department of Anatomy in 1977, the year Mehra joined as a pool officer at the institution. Subsequently, he took over the activities of the laboratory and by the time he was promoted to professor in 1993, the laboratory had developed into a referral centre as well as a core laboratory for histocompatibility workshops and AIIMS elevated its status to an independent department, the Department of Transplant Immunology and Immunogenetics, with Mehra as its founding chair. Under the aegis of the new department and in association with Dadhichi Deh Dan Samiti, he established the first Asian Indian Donor Marrow Registry (AIDMR), a database of the donors of bone marrow in India in 1994. He would later explain the details of the registry through an article, Asian Indian donor marrow registry: All India Institute of Medical Sciences experience, published in Transplantation Proceedings in 2007. He has delivered a number of keynote addresses or invited lectures including MedIndia 2003 2013 seminar of human genomics at the Guru Nanak Dev University, 2016 India-Japan Regulatory Symposium, and a Guest lecture series organized by Manipur University in 2016. He has also mentored around 60 masters and doctoral research scholars in their studies.
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