Ghada Alsaleh is Principal Investigator in Immunology and Autophagy at University of Oxford.

Moved to Oxford in 2017 to pursue her career as a scientist and to join Professor Katja Simon’s group at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, as a post-doc, where she developed a growing curiosity about aging and the regulation of biological processes that are disturbed during the aging process. Recently, she showed that Autophagy is specifically reduced in older human lymphoid cells, which contributes to compromised memory T and B cell responses in the elderly. This work has uncovered novel targets and biomarkers for the development of anti-aging drugs for human T cells.

Ghada has recently been awarded funding for her proposal “Targeting autophagy for the treatment of osteoarthritis”. Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common form of arthritis worldwide but lacks effective therapy. In this proposal, she aims to design a genetic screen using TFEB protein expression as a read-out to identify new potential targets for the treatment of Osteoarthritis and various age-related diseases.