Vivasvan Vykunta

About Vivasvan Vykunta

Vivasvan Vykunta is the child of immigrants from Andhra Pradesh, India who came to the United States for education and opportunity. Though born in Berkeley, California, Vivasvan spent his early years in India with just his grandparents before eventually returning to Fremont, California with his family. His grandparents remained central figures in his childhood as they would often visit, and Vivasvan would spend most summers with them in India. They also nurtured his early fascination with the natural world through gardening and hiking.

This early curiosity, coupled with his experiences witnessing relatives struggle with immune disorders, sparked Vivasvan’s interest in medicine and immunology. The more he learned, the more he became increasingly aware of how much remains unknown about the immune system. As an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley, Vivasvan sought to deepen our understanding of immune regulation by joining the lab of Julie Zikherman to dissect B cell immune responses. His work uncovered pathways that restrain B cells in the absence of costimulatory signals from bona fide pathogens, revealing key mechanisms underlying immune tolerance and homeostasis. His research led to co-authored publications in Nature Immunology and earned him the Excellence in Research Award at UC Berkeley.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley with a degree in molecular and cell biology, Vivasvan joined the lab of Alexander Marson with the goal of translating immunologic insights into new therapies. There, he developed CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing platforms to reprogram human immune cells and led the preclinical development of genome-engineered T cell therapies for multiple therapeutic applications. This work resulted in a high-profile publication in Nature Biotechnology, on which Vivasvan is a lead author. His additional contributions to developing genome engineering tools have been published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, Science Translational Medicine, and Nature Biotechnology, and his innovations have been patented. Notably, these gene-editing technologies are now being applied in clinical trials at UCSF to treat various cancers, infectious diseases, and immune disorders.

Vivasvan is currently pursuing training in the MD/PhD program at UCSF. In the lab of Matthew Krummel, he studies how immune cells detect and differentially respond to target proteins. He hopes to uncover new mechanisms for modulating immune responses across disease states. Ultimately, Vivasvan aims to integrate scientific discovery, patient care, and technology development as a physician-scientist and expand the arsenal of immunotherapies available to patients.