Ali Razaghi
Postdoctoral researcher
About me
A senior postdoctoral researcher with a speciality in Cancer Therapeutics, Medical Biotechnology and Immunotherapy. As a member of the research community of Karolinska Institute, one of the foremost global centres of medical science, Ali's research focuses on ground-breaking translational medicine using selenium-based chemotherapy and cytokine therapy approaches from pre-clinical stage to clinical trials in order to develop a more efficient treatment for benefiting cancer patients.
Research description
The main objective of my studies is to investigate how selenotherapy (selenium-based chemotherapeutics) in combination with cytokine therapy can benefit cancer patients by enhancing the efficacy and lowering the side effects of treatments.
My main specific research scopes are included:
- To explore and develop selenium-based chemotherapy particularly for pancreatic and liver cancers. Selenium-based compounds are potent chemotherapeutic agents eradicating a wide variety of tumour cells in low-dosage showing limited side-effects.
- To further advance the use of cytokine therapy in cancer immunotherapy. Cytokine therapy was the standard of care for treatment of many cancers from the 1980s onwards; hence, my approach is to utilize pro-inflammatory cytokines in a combinational regimen with chemotherapy to enhance the efficacy of treatments.
My main research interests are included but not limited to:
- Designing and optimizing combinational treatments of cytokine therapy and selenotherapy for cancer
- Utilizing ex-vivo organotypic models of surgical specimen cancer tissues for screening new cancer treatments
- Implementing bioinformatic based techniques such as metagenomics and meta-analysis methods to explore novel markers and targets for the treatment of cancer
- Improving the enzymatic activity of therapeutic proteins using mutagenesis techniques
- Discovery and assessment of novel cancer therapeutics particularly selenium-based compounds
- Enhancing the efficacy of biopharmaceutical using genetic engineering e.g. by improving glycosylation
Education
- Post Doctorate Diploma: Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden)
- PhD: James Cook University, Queensland, Australia
- MSc: University of Gothenburg (Göteborg, Sweden) and Leibniz University of Hanover (Hanover, Germany)
- Certificate in Advanced Cancer Biology, Johns Hopkins University, MD, USA