Hakan Alakus, MD

Hakan Alakus graduated from the Medical Faculty of the Westfälische-Wilhelm University at Münster/Germany in 2003. In the year of his graduation he started his medical training at the main Hospital of Herford which belongs to the teaching hospitals of Hannover Medical School. In 2006 Dr. Alakus completed his doctorate thesis on the identification of new single-nucleotide polymorphisms with prognostic impact in colorectal cancer (magna cum laude). He had performed the experimental part of his doctoral work at the Institute of Pharmacogenetics (Prof. W. Siffert) and at the Institute of Pathology (Prof. K.W. Schmid) at the University of Essen. From 2006 he continued his clinical training at the Department of General, Visceral and Cancer Surgery at the University of Cologne (Prof. Arnulf H. Hölscher) completing his specialization in surgery in 2010. Since his doctorate thesis, Dr. Alakus has been working on translational research for gastric, esophageal and colorectal carcinoma. Besides establishing new prognostic and therapy-predictive markers for these tumor types, he is engaged in research about cancer behavior in imaging techniques (FDG-PET).

Dr. Alakus has been awarded several research and travel grants for his studies on cancer research. In 2011, the German Cancer Aid (Deutsche Krebshilfe) awarded a two-year research grant to Dr. Alakus, allowing him to join the Frazer Lab in September 2011. Dr. Alakus’s project is to identify novel somatic mutations in rare gastrointestinal cancers. He is currently applying different techniques to isolate cells (FACS, Laser-Microdisssection, magnetic-beads-sorting) from tumors, which will then be used in exome sequencing to identify mutations that may be important in the development of these cancers.