Aya Helali

Dr. Aya El Helali is a clinician scientist that has recently joined the Department of Clinical Oncology at the University of Hong Kong. She was conferred the MB BCh BAO designation from the National University of Ireland Galway in 2008 and graduated with a first-class honors and gold medals in the fields of Medicine and Surgery. She was awarded the Sir Allen McClay Clinical Research Fellowship at the Stratified Medicine Group and conferred a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) by Queen’s University Belfast in 2018. Her PhD focused on the area of stress activated kinase, tumor angiogenesis and biomarker development. She obtained her specialist Medical Oncology qualification in 2018.

Dr. Aya El Helali has extensive experience in translational research and has been involved in investigating the distinct gastric cancer subtypes and their underlying molecular characteristics that may have implications on checkpoint inhibitor response, to deliver robust predictive biomarkers for immunotherapy response.

Research Interests

Dr. Aya El Helali research interests include understanding innate and adaptive immunity in solid cancers and adopting a personalized approach to identify novel drug combinations by integrating patient genomic data, thereby streamlining novel personalized therapeutics into clinical use by designing biomarker stratified phase I/II clinical trials. She has received the ECCO-AACR-EORTC-ESMO certificate of accreditation for Clinical Cancer Research experience in early phase clinical trials which led to the development of the ALM201 first-in-human phase I clinical trial.