ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2021

Saud AlDubayan, MD, is an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Computational Biologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Clinical Geneticist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an Associate Scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. AlDubayan graduated from King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia and received his clinical training in Internal Medicine at the University of Toronto and Clinical Genetics and Genomics at Harvard Medical School. He also did a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Clinical Computational Oncology Laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute. Dr. AlDubayan’s research focuses on utilizing various computational approaches to identify novel inherited genomic predictors of cancer risk, disease progression, and response to therapy and explore clinically focused questions using genomic, transcriptomic, and methylation data. Towards that end, Dr. AlDubayan led the effort to identify two novel colorectal cancer (CRC) predisposition genes (ATM and PALB2), collectively explaining CRC risk in 1.2% of all CRC patients. He also spearheaded an international effort to identify the first Mendelian germline predisposition gene in testicular germ cell tumors, CHEK2, with potentially immediate clinical and mechanistic implications. More recently, Dr. AlDubayan used machine-learning approaches on the germline genetic data of cancer patients to uncover clinically informative germline drivers of cancer risk, cancer progression, and response to therapy, an effort that may introduce a new paradigm for deep learning-based clinical germline variant characterization. Dr. AlDubayan has received numerous awards, including a Young Investigator Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF), a Career Development Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), a Charles A. King Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Physician Research Award from the US Department of Defense (DoD).

@s_aldubayan