Asst. Prof. Ahmet Acar from the Department of Biological Sciences at METU has received the Incentive Award in 2021 Aziz Sancar Science, Service and Incentive Awards organized by the Health Institutes of Turkey (TÜSEB).
The TÜSEB Incentive Award is given to scientists under the age of 40 who have demonstrated that they have the qualifications to make significant contributions to health science and technologies at an international level in the future.
Dr. Ahmet Acar has been conducting studies to develop original methods for understanding and overcoming drug resistance in cancer and its microenvironment, in addition to his efforts and research to understand the mechanisms that cause drug resistance in cancer with therapeutic practices.
Dr. Acar has been leading an interdisciplinary working group to establish an organoid biobank consisting of cancer patients, which will be the first of its kind in Turkey, where the fields of cancer biology and personalized medicine are still open to development. By using a new generation sequencing method, he aims to characterize organoid samples consisting of treatment-resistant cancer cells and thus pave the way for novel patient-specific treatment approaches.
Moreover, Dr. Acar has also been working on the development of deep learning-based digital pathology approaches with HistoCan, a techno-initiative he founded in METU Teknokent. This way, he aims to contribute to the digital transformation in the health ecosystem in our country.
