Dr Nick Kassouf is the Technical Tutor for Biomedical Science within the Department of Natural Sciences, since 2015.
He completed his PhD in oral oncology and apoptosis at Queen Mary, University of London in 2005 and soon after worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Cardiovascular Division at King's College London, investigating human platelet signalling pathways.
Following this position he took up the post of post-doctoral research associate at Imperial College London in 2008 working on a EU FP7 collaborative funded project to elucidate the role of KAI1, a metastasis suppressor and dependence receptor, in various cancer cell lines.
In 2010, Nick took up a post-doctoral research scientist position at The RAFT Institute working on a CRUK project involved in investigating the free radical-induced damage caused by UVA irradiation in melanomas and melanocyte cells with varying melanin content and DNA repair proteins.
In 2013 Nick became a senior research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire investigating skin dermal absorption and mass decontamination studies.
BSc, MSc, PhD, PGCertHE
English, Arabic, French (basic)
Nick is currently teaching on the Biomedical Foundation course as well as Biology/Biomedical undergraduate courses:
My main research interests are as follows:
Vu, Milan and Kassouf, Nick and Appiah, Sandra S. (2021) Betulinic Acid–Doxorubicin-Drug combination induced apoptotic death via ROS stimulation in a relapsed AML MOLM-13 cell model. Antioxidants , 10 (9). ISSN 2076-3921
Vu, Milan and Kassouf, Nick and Ofili, Rosemary Isioma and Lund, Torben and Bell, Celia M. and Appiah, Sandra S. (2020) Doxorubicin selectively induces apoptosis through the inhibition of a novel isoform of Bcl‑2 in acute myeloid leukaemia MOLM‑13 cells with reduced Beclin 1 expression. International Journal of Oncology , 57 (1). pp. 113-121. ISSN 1019-6439
Vu, Milan and Kassouf, Nick and Bell, Celia M. and Appiah, Sandra S. (2018) Betulinic acid-doxorubicin drug combination synergistically supresses cell viability and enhances apoptotic death in acute myeloid leukaemia cell lines by increasing Bax/Bcl-2 ratio. In: NCRI Cancer Conference (2018), 04-06 Nov 2018, Glasgow, Scotland.
Kassouf, Nick and Kay, Christopher W. M. and Volkov, Arsen and Chiang, Shih-Chieh and Birch-Machin, Mark A. and El-Khamisy, Sherif F. and Haywood, Rachel (2018) UVA-induced carbon-centered radicals in lightly pigmented cells detected using ESR spectroscopy. Free Radical Biology and Medicine , 126 . pp. 153-165. ISSN 0891-5849
Chiang, Shih-Chieh and Meagher, Martin and Kassouf, Nick and Hafezparast, Majid and McKinnon, Peter and Haywood, Rachel and El-Khamisy, Sherif (2017) Mitochondrial protein-linked DNA breaks perturb mitochondrial gene transcription and trigger free radical-induced DNA damage. Science Advances , 3 (4). ISSN 2375-2548