Vishva Mitra Dixit (born c. 1956) is a Kenyan-American physician who is currently Vice President and Senior Fellow of Physiological Chemistry and Research Biology at Genentech.

[3] Encouraged to train in research as part of the residency program, Dixit found a position in the lab of biochemistry professor William Frazier and became involved in a project on thrombospondin, a protein in the extracellular matrix.

[7] While at the University of Michigan, he received funding from the National Institutes of Health to support research into thrombospondin, as his laboratory had shown this protein had a role in promoting cancer metastases.

[14] His team's work on death receptor-induced apoptosis was notable, for prior to that time, cell surface receptors were thought to signal by functioning as ion channels or altering intracellular phosphorylation.

Dixit's work contributed to the discovery of a core complex composed of three proteins that enabled antigen receptors to activate the canonical NF-κB pathway: CARD11, BCL10 and MALT1/paracaspase.

[20] In a series of papers between 2016 and 2020, Dixit and his colleagues at Genentech also worked out the complex molecular mechanisms that regulate activity of caspase-8, OTULIN, RIPK1, RIPK3 and other proteins that modulate inflammation, apoptosis and necroptosis signaling by death receptors and TLRs.

[21][22][23][24][25] By 2002, Dixit was among the first scientists to demonstrate that pro-inflammatory caspases are part of a molecular complex named inflammasomes that are integral to the proper functioning of the innate immune system.

[29] Dixit's team discovered the non-canonical inflammasome pathway and its critical role in mediating lethal systemic inflammation in response to Gram-negative pathogens, detailed in three papers in 2011,[30] 2013,[31] and 2015.

[33] The 2013 paper clarified the role of Toll-like receptor 4 and caspase-11 in inducing innate immune responses to Lipopolysaccharides (LPS), a cell wall component of Gram-negative bacteria.

The research showed that recognition of intracellular LPS by innate immune cells leads to a form of necrotic, proinflammatory death, termed pyroptosis.

This led to the discovery that caspase-mediated cleavage of the protein GSDMD creates a pore forming, plasma membrane disrupting amino-terminal fragment that induces pyroptosis.

[35] The advances contributed to firmly establishing the sequence of events leading from inflammasome activation to pyroptosis, DAMP release, and lethal septic shock.

[47] He has served on the boards of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology.

[48] In 2022, Dixit received the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science,[49] which honors outstanding immigrant scientists for their research leadership in the United States and is awarded by the Vilcek Foundation, the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine[50] for his fundamental contributions to the fields of cell death and inflammation, and the Bijvoet Medal of the Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University.