University Associate Professor of Genetic Epidemiology for Cancer Development
Group Leader, Early Cancer Institute, University of Cambridge
UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow, University of Cambridge
Email: sk718@cam.ac.uk
Background
Dr Kar studied medicine at the Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Government Medical College and trained at the Sassoon General Hospitals in Pune, India. He holds an MPH degree from the University of Texas at Houston in the US and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in the UK, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar between 2012 and 2015. His scientific training has also included research stints at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas (2010-2012) and as a Junior Research Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge (2015-2019). Dr Kar was awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship by UKRI in 2020 that enabled him to establish his independent research group within the Medical Research Council (MRC) Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol. He returned to Cambridge as a Group Leader at the Early Cancer Institute in the Department of Oncology in March 2023.
Research
With the support of funding from UK Research and Innovation and Cancer Research UK, the Kar group primarily studies inherited or germline genetic variation and leverages this variation to investigate the causes, consequences, and correlates of key somatic or tumour genomic aberrations responsible for driving cancer development and progression. The ultimate aim is to use insights from this work to inform the prevention, early detection and treatment of common cancers. The group also investigates the population genetics of clonal haematopoiesis, a precursor condition for myeloid blood malignancies, and is funded to do this by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of the US and Blood Cancer UK.
The group is also involved in the search for inherited genetic risk factors that are pleiotropic or shared across some of the major hormone-related cancer types -- specifically breast, prostate, ovarian, and endometrial cancers -- and also shared between cancers and their risk factors. Cross-cancer pleiotropic genome-wide association studies may offer unique opportunities to build multi-cancer risk prediction and stratification tools to better target early detection interventions. This aspect of the group’s work is funded by a five-year R01 grant awarded in 2022 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) on which Siddhartha serves as one of three principal investigators (PIs), and is the only PI based outside the US.
Teaching
Dr. Kar serves as the Director of Postgraduate Education for the Department of Oncology and lectures on the MPhil in Population Health Sciences, the MSt in Genomic Medicine, and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre Lecture series in Cancer Biology and Medicine.
Publications
For a full list of Publications, please go to: Dr Siddhartha Kar - Google Scholar