Ahsan Akram (Affiliate)

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Research in a Nutshell

Lung Cancer remains the leading cause of cancer related death worldwide with an extremely poor 5-year survival. Recently, immunotherapy treatments have shown efficacy in refractory NCSLC, but only in a small proportion of patients with failure of therapy in the majority. My work focuses on a subtype of cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs) which express fibroblast activation protein (FAP⁺CAFs) in the tumour microenvironment. There is growing pre-clinical evidence these cells are responsible for immunotherapy failure. 

I will utilise primary lung cancer specimens to characterise the fibroblast populations and assess their phenotype and role in immunotherapy failure, alongside targeted pharmacotherapy in pre-clinical models. I will also develop imaging strategies, both whole body approaches with PET imaging and high resolution optical imaging to ultimately understand the stromal response in patients during therapy. I hope that in the future these novel translational imaging approaches have the potential to stratify patients for tailored cancer immunotherapy (+/-companion therapeutics).

I also welcome potential collaborations and students.

Research Programme: Fibroblast Activation Protein Expressing Cancer Associated Fibroblasts from Lung Cancer As Imaging Biomarkers For Immunotherapy Stratification.

Contact

ahsan.akram@ed.ac.uk

Cancer Research Collaborations

• Professor Margaret Frame, University of Edinburgh 
• Professor Kev Dhaliwal, University of Edinburgh 
• Professor Mark Bradley, University of Edinburgh

Partners and Funders (current)

• Cancer Research UK (Clinician Scientist Fellowship, Dec 2017-Dec 2022.)
• Wellcome Trust