Sawsan Al Boeisa

About

Sawsan Al Boeisa completed her MSc in Bioengineering at KAUST in 2025 under the supervision of Robert Hoehndorf, with co-supervision and laboratory hosting from the Merzaban lab. She defended her thesis on 17 November 2025 and the final document was archived in the KAUST repository in December 2025.

Her thesis, Differential Effects of p38 MAPK Inhibition on Chemoresistance in Patients with Colorectal Cancer, is a wet-lab pilot study in translational cancer biology. It investigates whether pharmacological inhibition of p38 MAPK can reverse or modulate chemoresistance in patient-derived colorectal cancer samples. The work establishes a methodological pipeline for combining 2D and 3D culture systems with dose–response readouts and protein-level analyses (Western blotting against phosphorylated effectors such as Erk1/2), and characterises differential responses between two patient samples to a p38 inhibitor in combination with standard chemotherapeutic agents.

The thesis is positioned as a pilot and method-development study, and the committee feedback explicitly framed it as a foundation for reproducible follow-on work on 3D culture systems, solvent and inhibitor specificity controls, and quantitative dose–response analysis in colorectal cancer chemoresistance. Sawsan's work complements the group's interests in biomedical informatics and translational applications of computational and experimental biology, and her thesis committee included Robert Hoehndorf, Jasmeen Merzaban, and Stefan Arold.