Rate My Professor Mehbuba Hossain

Dr. Mehbuba Hossain serves as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Pathology, Dunedin School of Medicine, within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago. Her research centers on developmental genetics and epigenetics, with a primary focus on melanoma, renal cell carcinoma, and lung cancer. She investigates the interplay of genomic, epigenomic, and immune mechanisms in cancer progression, particularly phenotype switching in melanoma cells that leads to drug resistance and immune evasion. Utilizing advanced bioinformatics, single-cell RNA sequencing, and enzymatic methylation library preparation, Hossain identifies biomarkers such as distinct DNA methylation patterns in non-responding versus responding melanoma patients to immune checkpoint inhibitors like anti-PD1 therapy. Her current projects include isolating circulating tumor cells with the Parsortix system to uncover blood-based gene expression markers for metastasis and optimizing techniques for methylation analysis under metabolic stress, which alters genome 3D structure.

Hossain earned her PhD in Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics from the University of Otago in 2023, with a thesis titled 'Investigation of potential genomic biomarkers to predict immunotherapy response in melanoma,' supervised by Professors Michael R. Eccles and Aniruddha Chatterjee. She previously obtained a Master of Biomedical Science from Monash University, Australia. During her PhD from 2019 to 2023 in the Chatterjee Laboratory with co-supervision from the Eccles lab, and continuing as a postdoctoral fellow, her work culminated in high-impact publications, including 'Pre-treatment DNA methylome and transcriptome profiles correlate with melanoma response to anti-PD1 immunotherapy' (Cancer Letters, 2025), 'Phenotype Switching and the Melanoma Microenvironment: Impact on Immunotherapy and Drug Resistance' (International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2023, cited 92 times), 'Genomic and Epigenomic Biomarkers of Immune Checkpoint Immunotherapy Response in Melanoma' (IJMS, 2024), and 'Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Therapy for Metastatic Melanoma' (IJMS, 2024). With 316 citations on Google Scholar, her contributions advance personalized medicine and precise melanoma treatments. Awards include the NZ Institute for Cancer Research Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship, Otago Doctoral Scholarship, Monash University Merit Scholarship, and grants from the Maurice Wilkins Centre and Maurice and Phyllis Paykel Trust.