Dr Pinar Akcakaya

Pinar Akcakaya is a Team Lead in the Discovery Sciences department at AstraZeneca. Pinar performed her PhD studies at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, where she investigated the role of microRNAs in imatinib resistance in gastrointestinal stromal tumor cells and patients. After her PhD, Pinar joined the AstraZeneca postdoctoral research program in Marcello Maresca`s team in Gothenburg, Sweden. As a postdoctoral scientist, she worked on establishing approaches to investigate the genome-wide precision of CRISPR‐Cas9 mediated gene engineering systems in vivo. Following the completion of her postdoctoral work, Pinar joined the Genome Engineering team in AstraZeneca Gothenburg, where she is currently working towards developing novel CRISPR genome editing tools and using CRISPR technologies to create disease models, to validate new drug targets and to generate CRISPR medicines. Pinar has received several awards in recognition of her work on developing CRISPR off-target evaluation approaches, including AstraZeneca CEO award for the best pre-clinical publication and IMED Science award for the postdoctoral scientist of the year.