Biography
Siddhartha 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). Siddhartha 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
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 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 at scale in health systems.
Publications
- Genome-wide analyses of 200,453 individuals yield new insights into the causes and consequences of clonal hematopoiesis. Kar SP, Quiros PM, Gu M, Jiang T, Mitchell J, Langdon R, et al. Nat Genet. 2022 Aug;54(8):1155–66. doi: 10.1038/s41588-022-01121-z
- A multi-level investigation of the genetic relationship between endometriosis and ovarian cancer histotypes. Mortlock S, Corona RI, Kho PF, Pharoah P, Seo J-H, Freedman ML, Gayther SA, ...7 authors..., Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium, International Endometriosis Genetics Consortium, Montgomery GW, Lawrenson K, Kar SP. Cell Rep Med. 2022 Mar 15;3(3):100542. doi: 10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100542
- Genetically predicted circulating protein biomarkers and ovarian cancer risk. Considine DPC, Jia G, Shu X, Schildkraut JM, Pharoah PDP, Zheng W, Kar SP. Gynecol Oncol. 2021 Feb;160(2):506–13. doi: 10.1016/j.ygyno.2020.11.016
- Genome-wide meta-analyses of breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer association studies identify multiple new susceptibility loci shared by at least two cancer types. Kar SP, Beesley J, Amin Al Olama A, Michailidou K, Tyrer J, Kote-Jarai Zs, et al. Cancer Discov. 2016 Sep;6(9):1052–67. doi: 10.1158/2159-8290.CD-15-1227
Google Scholar link to publications: https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=WAXlOQ0AAAAJ&hl=en
Teaching and Supervisions
- Clinical Research Training Fellows
- PhD Students
- Masters Students
- Visiting Students
Other Professional Activities
- Lecturer on the MSt in Genomic Medicine, MRes in Cancer Biology, and MPhil in Population Health Sciences master's degree programmes at the University of Cambridge
- Faculty on the European Hematology Association-European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute (EHA-EMBL-EBI) computational biology training programme
- Member of the Editorial Board, ecancer
