Gopal Kundu

Gopal Chandra Kundu (born 2 November 1959 ) is an Indian cell and cancer biologist who worked as a scientist at the Indian National Centre for Cell Science. He is known for his contributions towards the understanding the mechanism of cancer progression in breast, melanoma and other cancers and development of novel therapeutic targets and target-based therapy in cancers.

An elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, India, he received the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology in 2003. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest Indian science awards, in 2004.

Education and career Kundu studied chemistry and biology at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. He obtained a B.Sc. with major in chemistry from the University of Calcutta (affiliating university of SCC) in 1980. He completed M.Sc. in chemistry at the University of Calcutta in 1982. At NCCS, he published his most important research papers covering tumor biology, regulation of gene expression, cell signaling, angiogenesis, cancer therapeutics, biomarker studies for cancer detection, and nanomedicine.

In 2019, Kundu retired from the government service at superannuation age. He was immediately appointed as director of research and development at the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), a private university in Bhubaneswar, Odissa. He also holds professor positions in biotechnology at KIIT and in medicine and molecular research at Kalinga Institute of Medical Science.

He serves as Editorial Board Member of Current Molecular Medicine, Current Chemical Biology, Frontiers in Medicine, International Journal of Oncology, Molecular Medicine Reports, The Open Cancer Journal and American Journal of Cancer Research. He is an associate editor of Molecular Cancer and Journal of Cancer Metastasis and Treatment. the award of which is considered as the most prestigious in science under the government of India. In 2007, the International Journal of Molecular Medicine from Greece gave him an "International award for an outstanding achievement in oncology". In 2013, he received the 7th National Grassroots Innovation Awards from the National Innovation Foundation for his works in cancer biology.

Controversy A controversy erupted in the NCCS in 2006 when an anonymous mail alleged that Kundu and others might have misrepresented data in a paper published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The allegation was that they had rehashed the same set of data which they had published earlier. An internal committee of the NCCS advised the authors to take back their paper, however an independent committee led by G. Padmanabhan, a former director of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, concluded that there was no manipulation in the data. On 23 February 2007, the Journal of Biological Chemistry'' withdrew the paper amid allegations of data manipulation, although the authors maintained that the two papers used different set of data though similar experiments.