After his infectious disease training at MGH and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Bhattacharyya served as chief resident at MGH and began considering his future as a physician-scientist. He saw how genomic technology had progressed during the seven years he’d spent in medical school, spawning discoveries like new mutations underlying leukemia, and he wanted to bring the same capabilities to the study of infectious disease.

In 2012, he joined the Broad Institute as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Broad core institute member Deborah Hung, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and MGH, an infectious disease physician at BWH, and an attending critical care physician in the Medical Intensive Care Unit at BWH. Bhattacharyya continued to see patients and consult on difficult cases as an infectious disease doctor at MGH, but he spent most of his time leading research in Hung’s lab aimed at unraveling interactions between humans and their pathogens and pinpointing new targets for antimicrobial therapeutics.

In 2019, Bhattacharyya launched his own lab at the Broad, but just as his research was picking up speed, a new threat emerged that would soon overshadow his clinical, scientific, and personal life.

RESEARCH, INTERRUPTED

When Bhattacharyya first heard rumblings about the new respiratory virus spreading overseas in early 2020, his lab had only one other member, a research assistant. “Once I heard there were cases outside of China, I knew we were going to have problems, but we didn’t yet know their magnitude or pace,” said Bhattacharyya. After the lab’s first postdoctoral researcher, Alexis Jaramillo Cartagena, arrived in February, the team realized that pandemic restrictions would be coming soon. They started running experiments at a breakneck pace, gathering as much data as they could, as fast as possible, so they would have results to analyze at home during what they naively thought would be a two-week-long lab closure.

As that temporary lockdown turned into a longer pause in work, Bhattacharyya prepared to return to MGH in April for two weeks of clinical service in the infectious disease ward, and he knew COVID-19 cases would be surging by then. He frantically learned what he could about the virus and was alarmed by reports from doctors in hard-hit hospitals in Italy who were in tears, overwhelmed by seeing their colleagues becoming desperately ill. “I couldn’t fathom what it was going to be like,” he said. “At the time, we knew nothing about how to manage it.”

At MGH, Bhattacharyya typically spends six to eight weeks each year on a consult team that steps in when the primary medical team needs help with tricky infectious disease cases. But in April 2020, “suddenly, half the patients at the hospital had a brand new infection, so we were busier than ever by a long shot,” he recalled. With elective procedures on hold, parts of the hospital were eerily quiet while the intensive care unit overflowed. Bhattacharyya was particularly struck by the emptiness of ICU waiting rooms absent of grieving families, as no visitors were allowed. During that April service, he helped the medical staff create five new ICUs on the fly, while guiding care for the sickest of the sick among hundreds of critically ill patients with COVID.

At the time, he was one of the relatively few physicians who had personally cared for COVID patients. Once his two-week service was over, Bhattacharyya helped advise medical teams at his hospital and beyond on how to care for these patients, and he guided research groups in designing their COVID studies and determining the most urgent clinical questions that needed answering. He also served on a COVID task force at the Broad to advise the institute’s response to the pandemic, providing a valuable window into hospital procedures that helped guide Broad’s decision-makers.

Bhattacharyya dealt with the stress and uncertainty of the time by reading everything he could about the new virus and sharing his insights on social media and in more than a dozen town hall presentations and other events for the Broad community. The videos of his talks have been viewed and shared thousands of times online. In them, he distilled data from dozens of studies, while sharing thoughts on how he and his family were managing COVID risks, like whether he’d have his two young children wear masks on the playground.

His talks took a more hopeful tone when the COVID vaccines became a reality. “I remember the morning I got a text alert on my phone, with data showing the new vaccine’s high efficacy, and I literally started to cry. It changed everything,” he said. Bhattacharyya later helped others at MGH reach out to communities that might not trust messages about the virus and vaccines. “I felt like sharing knowledge about the vaccines was the most important thing I was doing at the time, and perhaps that I would do in my entire career.”

In 2021, the Broad gave Bhattacharyya its most prestigious award for members of the institute, in recognition of his work helping the scientific community navigate the pandemic safely. During the awards ceremony, Broad’s then-chief operating officer Jesse Souweine described the personal and professional impact he’d made. “Roby meets people where they are — scientists and nonscientists alike,” she said. “He can tackle any question, ranging from the highly specific and detailed ones about study design to the ones asked by the rest of us, like ‘Is it safe for my kids to hug their grandparents?’,” she added while fighting back tears.

Bhattacharyya and his team also contributed to COVID research, helping colleagues study how cells and tissues respond in patients with COVID and the mechanisms underlying its severity.

BACK IN THE LAB

Eventually, Bhattacharyya was able to return to the lab and resume his own scientific work, which focuses on transcriptional changes that occur when a patient is infected or when a pathogen is exposed to antimicrobial drugs. He’s since built a team of ten scientists, plus two rotating graduate students, focused on the situations that have troubled him in the clinic, such as sepsis, which afflicted far too many of Bhattacharyya’s patients. “No matter what we do, one in four patients who get sepsis will die from it, and that figure hasn’t changed in decades,” he said.