MRS Asli Akidil

Asli Akidil is a cell and molecular scientist within the Microphysiological Systems Centre of Excellence (MPS CoE), which is part of the Drug Safety and Metabolism(DSM) department at AstraZeneca. The MPS CoE team aims to implement both healthy and diseased-based organ-on-a-chip models for preclinical drug safety assessments and provide a platform on which early innovative drug delivery systems can be further tested. She is currently focusing on the implementation of the liver-on-a-chip platform and on the development of biomarker detection methods by employing automated confocal imaging and analysis processes.
After graduating from Hacettepe University with a BSc in Chemistry, Asli went on to complete her MSc in Advanced Material Sciences at the University of Ulm, specialising in Biomaterials. She wrote her master’s thesis at the world-renowned Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, where she focused on designing in vivo like 3D platforms for both cancer and healthy cell lines.
Upon completing of her thesis, Asli joined the Molecular Genetics for Myeloid Leukaemia clinical research group at the University Hospital of Ulm. Here, she was part of a study that performed mutation analysis in genes that are known to be involved in hematopoietic differentiation and proliferation, which result in acute myeloid leukaemia.
She then spent three years as a researcher based in the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute and worked on collaborative projects, funded by the Medicines for Malaria Venture and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The research project was to identify new anti-malarial compounds as well as define the alternations in human malaria parasites genomes that causes resistance to current drugs and treatments. To achieve this, she worked on the development of new molecular genetic approaches with CRISPR/Cas9 technology.