Firas Sadiyah, PhD
Through his postdoctoral research, Firas is leveraging the expanding number of clinical genomic data to identify novel targets for immunotherapy and early cancer detection.
Firas obtained his PhD in Immunology and Computational Genomics at Cambridge University, where he investigated how enhancer-promoter interactions drive cell-fate decisions within the CD4+ T cell lineage to determine their immune response.
While in the U.S., he identified lineage-specific roles of key oncogenic proteins in childhood leukaemia at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).
At the University Hospital of Düsseldorf (UKD), he worked on the tumorigenic potential of aberrant mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in relapsing childhood leukaemia.
As a postgraduate, he obtained an MSc in Immunology for his work on the binding ability of the viral RL11 protein family to the cells of the immune system at Hanover Medical School (MHH).
Published Works
- Whiteside, S. K., Grant, F. M., Gyori, D. S., Conti, A. G., Imianowski, C. J., Kuo, P., Nasrallah, R., Sadiyah, F., Lira, S. A., Tacke, F., Eil, R. L., Burton, O. T., Dooley, J., Liston, A., Okkenhaug, K., Yang, J., & Roychoudhuri, R. (2021). CCR8 marks highly suppressive Treg cells within tumours but is dispensable for their accumulation and suppressive function. Immunology, 163(4), 512–520. https://doi.org/10.1111/imm.13337
- Grant, F. M., Yang, J., Nasrallah, R., Clarke, J., Sadiyah, F., Whiteside, S. K., Imianowski, C. J., Kuo, P., Vardaka, P., Todorov, T., Zandhuis, N., Patrascan, I., Tough, D. F., Kometani, K., Eil, R., Kurosaki, T., Okkenhaug, K., & Roychoudhuri, R. (2020). BACH2 drives quiescence and maintenance of resting Treg cells to promote homeostasis and cancer immunosuppression. The Journal of experimental medicine, 217(9), e20190711. https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20190711
- Nasrallah, R., Imianowski, C. J., Bossini-Castillo, L., Grant, F. M., Dogan, M., Placek, L., Kozhaya, L., Kuo, P., Sadiyah, F., Whiteside, S. K., Mumbach, M. R., Glinos, D., Vardaka, P., Whyte, C. E., Lozano, T., Fujita, T., Fujii, H., Liston, A., Andrews, S., Cozzani, A., … Roychoudhuri, R. (2020). A distal enhancer at risk locus 11q13.5 promotes suppression of colitis by Treg cells. Nature, 583(7816), 447–452. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2296-7
- Sadiyah, M. F., & Roychoudhuri, R. (2019). Genome-Wide Measurement and Computational Analysis of Transcription Factor Binding and Chromatin Accessibility in Lymphocytes. Current protocols in immunology, 126(1), e84. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpim.84
- Afzali, B., Grönholm, J., Vandrovcova, J., O'Brien, C., Sun, H. W., Vanderleyden, I., Davis, F. P., Khoder, A., Zhang, Y., Hegazy, A. N., Villarino, A. V., Palmer, I. W., Kaufman, J., Watts, N. R., Kazemian, M., Kamenyeva, O., Keith, J., Sayed, A., Kasperaviciute, D., Mueller, M., … Laurence, A. D. J. (2017). BACH2 immunodeficiency illustrates an association between super-enhancers and haploinsufficiency. Nature immunology, 18(7), 813–823. https://doi.org/10.1038/ni.3753
- Swaminathan, S., Huang, C., Geng, H., Chen, Z., Harvey, R., Kang, H., Ng, C., Titz, B., Hurtz, C., Sadiyah, M. F., Nowak, D., Thoennissen, G. B., Rand, V., Graeber, T. G., Koeffler, H. P., Carroll, W. L., Willman, C. L., Hall, A. G., Igarashi, K., Melnick, A., … Müschen, M. (2013). BACH2 mediates negative selection and p53-dependent tumor suppression at the pre-B cell receptor checkpoint. Nature medicine, 19(8), 1014–1022. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3247
Contact Us
Prof. Serena Nik-Zainal
Early Cancer Institute
University of Cambridge
Hutchison Research Centre
Box 197
Cambridge Biomedical Campus
Cambridge
United Kingdom
CB2 0XZ