AREAS OF SPECIALTY:
Inflammaging
Immunology
Metabolism
Vishwa Deep Dixit, DVM, PhD
Dr. Vishwa Deep Dixit is the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Pathology, Immunobiology and of Comparative Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. He is also director of the Yale’s Center for Research on Aging (Y-Age). Son of teachers, Deep grew up in Hisar, India. He studied veterinary medicine in India, did PhD research at the University of Hannover, Germany, and postdoctoral research at Morehouse School of Medicine, in Atlanta, and the National Institute on Aging (NIH), in Baltimore, USA. Deep started his laboratory in 2006 to study Immunometabolism at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was recruited to Yale in 2013, where his team studies the interactions between immune and metabolic systems that control inflammation and the process of aging.
His team helped establish NLRP3 inflammasome activation in macrophages as a key mechanism of “inflammaging” and immunological aging, that impairs organismal metabolism and cause age-related degenerative conditions. Dixit lab has identified metabolic checkpoints that control immune system to restrain inflammation which may impact longevity. This includes his findings that ketone bodies inhibit inflammation by deactivating the NLRP3 inflammasome. His team also found that ketogenic diet can protect against viral infections (influenza and COVID) by expanding gamma-delta T cells in animal models of disease. His laboratory discovered that the moderate restriction of calories in humans, which induces negative energy balance, reveals endogenous CR-mimetic targets (PLA2G7 and SPARC) that reign in inflammation and may play a role in enhancing healthy lifespan. Ongoing research in Dixit’s lab is focused on interrogating how the nutrient and energy-sensing mechanisms in a host can be harnessed to identify immunometabolic checkpoints to enhance health and longevity. Dixit’s research has been published in leading scientific journals, and he has been recognized for his work by numerous awards, including the National Institute on Aging’s, 2017 Nathan Shock Award for his pioneering work on mechanism that control Immunobiology of aging and Inflammaging-mediated functional decline. Research in the Dixit laboratory is funded by the US, National Institutes of Health since 2007.