Said Dermime

Dr. Said Dermime is a highly experienced senior scientist in Cellular Immunology and Cancer Immunotherapy with more than 25 years of expertise in the fields of academia and research and over 10 years of experience in establishing research groups and/or departments. The specific areas of his expertise include mechanisms of immune escape in cancer, tumor antigen-specific immune responses, cancer immunomodulation, and the characterization and the expansion of tumor specific T cells in cancer patients. 

Dr. Dermime obtained his Ph.D. degree in Immunology from Salford University, Manchester, UK in 1992. He then joined the National Cancer Institute, Milan, Italy (1992-1994) then the NHLBI, NIH, Bethesda, USA (1995-1997) as postdoctoral fellow. He was a leader of the lymphoma-cancer vaccine team at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, Manchester and was then appointed as senior scientist to establish and lead the Tumor Immunology Section at King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Riyadh. In 2015, Dr. Said joined the National Centre for Cancer Care and Research (NCCCR) at Hamad Medical Corporation. He is the Director of the Translational Cancer Research Facility at iTRI-HMC. 

Dr. Dermime has in-depth knowledge of designing therapeutic and prophylactic strategies and evaluating them in preclinical and clinical studies where he was able to develop complementary approaches with respect to immunological assays of tumour immunity and cancer vaccines. He has also been a major contributor to several scientific discoveries. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in high impact journals such as Blood, Cancer Research, Journal of Immunology, Clinical Cancer Research, Neoplasia, Breast Cancer Research, Frontiers in Immunology and Molecular Oncology.  

Dr. Dermime’s achievements are many, including identifying the cause of resistance to the drug retinoic acid in acute leukaemia (Blood 1993; 82:1573), discovering a novel leukaemia vaccine against proteinase-3 as a target antigen (Blood 1996; 88:2450) and demonstrating that the lymphoma idio-type is a potential cancer vaccine target (Journal of Immunology 2002; 168:3983). 

He also demonstrated the expression of the PD-L1 inhibitory molecule in breast cancer (Neoplasia; 2006; 8:190), showed a direct evidence of PD-L1 induction in breast cancer (Int. J Cancer; 2007; 121:751) and the involvement of PD-L1 and regulatory T cells in the immune escape of breast cancer (BMC Cancer 2008; 8:57). In addition, he was able to discover an antigen-specific regulatory T cell population in leukaemia patients (Cancer Research 2008; 68:6350).