Abdullah Khan

I am a Group Leader in the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, and a Wellcome Career Development Fellow. I’m interested in how blood and immune cells are produced, and particularly in how the systems that drive that production change with ageing and disease. To explore these questions, I engineer human model systems—mini organs or organoids.

I completed my PhD at the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, University of Birmingham, where I established a method for generating CRISPR-edited megakaryocytes (platelet-producing cells) from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). I also developed a CRISPR-based approach to express photo-switchable tags in iPSCs and their progeny, enabling single-molecule imaging.

After completing my PhD in 2019, I was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship to develop a bone marrow organoid model for studying myeloid cancers. That award began at the University of Birmingham in 2020. In 2022, I undertook a six-month secondment at Boston Children’s Hospital (Harvard Medical School) in the Machlus/Italiano lab. I then joined Beth Psaila’s group at the MRC WIMM in 2023 and have since established my own research group, supported by a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award.

My recent research has focused on developing and applying vascularised human organoid models, with a particular emphasis on the bone marrow—the system responsible for blood and immune cell generation throughout adult life. I developed the first human bone marrow organoid model that captured the myeloid niche and, together with the Oxford team, have since advanced this system to better reflect the complexity of the native environment. We use these models to dissect healthy, aged, and diseased biology, and to develop human pre-clinical platforms that we believe will accelerate both basic and translational research.

More recently, we’ve begun coupling different organoid systems to model, for the first time, how injury to other tissues (e.g. cardiac tissue) drives immune cell recruitment, and how that immune response influences tissue injury and repair.

Outside of research, I’m overly fond of reading, music, eating, and dangling from precarious rock faces by my fingertips—questioning all my life choices.