Fyza Y. Shaikh, MD, PhD

Fyza Shaikh is an Assistant Professor in Cancer Immunology in the Department of Oncology in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. She joined the faculty after completing her fellowship in medical oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (JHSOM) and residency in internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center as part of the ABIM research pathway. She received her MD and PhD in Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. 

The Shaikh lab at JHSOM is focused on how the microbiome impacts host immunological responses to tumorigenesis and anti-tumor responses to immunomodulatory agents. The lab uses a combination of translational approaches using samples collected from human cohort studies and clinical trials as well as murine models to ask more detailed mechanistic questions and works across multiple tumor types (melanoma, lung, esophageal, head and neck, etc). The overall approach uses combination of clinical, computational, and lab-based techniques using a rich biorepository containing clinically annotated metadata with known and putative biomarkers of ICI response, such as PD-L1 and tumor mutational burden, paired with longitudinal fecal and plasma samples that correlate with clinical milestones (i.e. response/nonresponse by imaging and treatment-related toxicity). The goal is to focus on microbial functionality and build defined bacterial consortia that can then be tested in murine models to define colonization, metabolomics, and intra-tumoral immune response. This translational approach, with cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of human samples, paired with mechanistic studies in murine models, has the potential to address both limitations in previously published studies and generate new hypotheses to make advances in this field and improve ICI responses for patients with advanced malignancies.