Dr. Soham Gupta

Dr. Soham Gupta is an Assistant Senior Lecturer and Docent at the Division of Clinical Microbiology, Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. He leads the team ‘Innate Immune Responses during Viral Infections’ within the Systems Virology Lab. He obtained his PhD in Medical Microbiology in 2014 and subsequently undertook postdoctoral research at Karolinska Institutet, where he studied how herpesvirus-encoded proteases interfere with host antiviral defences. He established his independent research programme at KI in 2019 and was appointed Docent in 2026.

His research focuses on understanding how viruses interact with host cells, evade innate immune responses and alter cellular processes to support infection. A major area of his work concerns ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like modifications, particularly ISG15, and their roles in antiviral immunity, cellular metabolism and host defence. His team investigates how viral enzymes, including the SARS-CoV-2 papain-like protease (PLpro) and the Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus OTU protease, manipulate these pathways and influence viral replication and host responses.

An important direction of his research is the relationship between innate immunity and cellular metabolism. His group studies how ISG15 and its regulatory partner USP18 influence interferon signalling, mitochondrial function and nucleotide metabolism, and how these processes contribute to antiviral restriction. The work combines molecular and cellular virology, protein biochemistry, genetic approaches, proteomics, metabolomics and physiologically relevant infection models. His research also extends to the immunometabolic consequences of viral infections, including persistent inflammation and post-COVID complications.

His research has been supported by the Swedish Research Council, the Centre for Innovative Medicine (CIMED), Karolinska Institutet and other Swedish research foundations. He is also a Work Package leader in the EU Horizon Europe COMBAT consortium, which investigates dengue pathogenesis and antiviral strategies. Alongside his research, he supervises doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers and contributes to teaching in microbiology, virology and infection biology at Karolinska Institutet.

Within the MERIT Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network, he is the principal supervisor of DC14, ‘Mechanisms of PLpro-mediated host-cell reprogramming in SARS-CoV-2 infection and persistence’. The project will investigate how PLpro alters antiviral signalling, host-cell metabolism and other cellular processes through its deISGylating, deubiquitinating and immune-modulatory activities, and how these changes may contribute to viral persistence and longer-term inflammatory consequences.