Richard Adeyemi, DVM, PhD

Dr. Richard Adeyemi, DVM, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He obtained his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree with distinctions at the University of Ibadan. He then moved to the United States for graduate school in Molecular Microbiology, joining the virology lab of Dr. David Pintel at the University of Missouri. In Dr. Pintel’s lab, Dr. Adeyemi studied virus-host interactions and discovered a previously unknown cellular antiviral response that, following infection with small DNA viruses, is hijacked to promote viral replication. For his postdoc, Dr Adeyemi joined the Genetics lab of Dr Stephen Elledge at Harvard Medical School. As a Life Sciences Research Foundation (LSRF) postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Adeyemi made use of genome-scale high-throughput CRISPR screening approaches to discover the compendium of cellular genes that are essential for responding to replication stress. In particular, Dr. Adeyemi discovered Protexin, a novel complex that is involved in maintaining the integrity of cellular rDNA following DNA damage during replication. He also studied synthetic lethal pathways that modulate BRCA mutant cancer cells. At the Hutch, Dr. Adeyemi is making use of genomics, computational and molecular biology tools to further characterize the molecular mechanisms by which cells deal with replication stress and to discover novel cellular vulnerabilities that can be targeted for therapy in ovarian cancers.