Sadanandam Lab website
Biography
Dr Sadanandam is a Group Leader (Associate Professor) at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London since 2013 (tenured – 2018) and is currently applying his multidisciplinary skills to integrated science of systems biology to identify and test precise therapies for different subtypes of cancers using computational (artificial intelligence), experimental (including pre-clinical and in vivo models) and clinical (accessing clinical trial samples) biology.
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He has developed multiple machine learning, biomarker and companion diagnostic tools that are currently explored for patient care through academic and industrial collaborations. He has a resource of more than 35 mouse and cell lines models for pre-clinical trials specifically for immune/stromal therapies.
Dr Sadanandam obtained his PhD in Pathology and Microbiology with specialty in Bioinformatics from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, Nebraska, USA (unique interdisciplinary program available at few places in the USA), where he combined both experimental and computational biology to identify and characterize metastatic biomarkers in pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDA). There were a handful of such interdisciplinary researchers in cancer biology at that time.
Dr Sadanandam did his postdoctoral fellowship with two world-renowned mentors: Joe Gray (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) and Douglas Hanahan (Swiss Federale Institute of Lausanne, EPFL). He briefly worked at Swiss Institute of Cancer.
Dr Sadanandam led the research work to define transcriptome subtypes of colorectal cancer associated with prognosis and potential personalised medicine (Sadanandam et al., Nature Medicine 2013). This work, along with other groups, led to ColoRectal Cancer Subtyping Consortium (CRCSC; Guinney et al., Nature Medicine 2015; Sadanandam as a co-senior author and Nyamundanda from Sadanandam lab as a co-first author).
He also co-led a research effort to identify PDA subtypes with prognostic and predictive significance (first report; Collisson and Sadanandam et al Nature Medicine 2011; co-first author; highly cited).
In addition, he co-led reclassification of breast cancer cell lines into subtypes that match the existing patient tumour subtypes and predicted gene expression subtype- and DNA copy number change-specific therapy by screening 77 different approved and experimental therapeutic compounds (Heiser and Sadanandam et al., PNAS 2012).
Further, he defined novel subtypes and correlated them to therapeutic responses using genetically engineered mouse (GEM) and transplanted mouse models in pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PanNETs; again for the first time; Sadanandam et al., Cancer Discovery 2015). These works are highly cited in the field.
He also recently developed prognostic signature and biomarker assay for perioperative chemotherapy treated gastroesophageal cancer patients (Smyth et al., Annals of Oncology 2018); first patient-based cancer-associated fibroblast subtypes in pancreatic adenocarcinoma (Neuzillet et al., J. Pathology 2019; co-corresponding author); luminal heterogeneity associated with heteroceullular phenotypes (Poudel et al., NPJ Breast Cancer); and colorectal cancer subtype assays (Ragulan et al., Nature Scientific Reports 2019).
Dr Sadanandam is currently co-ordinating multiple projects related to Global (specifically Low and Middle Income Countries) Cancer Research.
He has won several awards and honours. He is internationally known for his subtyping and personalised cancer research.