Dr Andrew Steele BSc(Hons), M.Phil, PhD
Visiting Professor
Dr Andrew Steele is a Visiting Professor within Medicine at the University of Southampton.
Dr Steele obtained his PhD in molecular biology from the University of Hertfordshire in 2003. His first postdoctoral position was in the laboratories of Professor Gillian Tozer and Professor David Shima at Gray Cancer Institute and CR-UK Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he was involved in a project investigating hypoxia and its effect on vascular branching in human bladder carcinoma. Dr Steele briefly studied viral involvement in Motor Neurone Disease with Dr Garson and Professor Tedder at UCL medical school before moving to the laboratory of Dr RG Wickremasinghe at UCL Cancer Institute in 2004. During this time, he worked closely with Professor Victor Hoffbrand, Dr Archie Prentice and Professor Amit Nathwani to better understand microenvironmental signalling, novel therapeutics and chemotherapy resistance mechanisms in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia (CLL).
Dr Steele moved to the University of Southampton in March 2011 to take up a lectureship position in the Cancer Sciences Unit, within the B cell malignancies group where he collaborated with Professors Graham Packham, Freda Stevenson, Mark Cragg and Jonathan Strefford. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2013 after establishing a Bloodwise funded South Coast tissue biobank with Professor Oscier, which stores with consent, blood samples from patients with lymphoproliferative malignancies. He was subsequently promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 based on his research investigating a role of Interleukin-4 (IL-4) in B cell receptor signalling and the role of autophagy in CLL pathology. Dr Steele works extensively with a number of national and international collaborators within Europe and the USA. Dr Steele has consulted for a number of pharmaceutical companies and performed an industrial sabbatical in 2017/2018 in the USA to better understand small molecule drug discovery and development. During his sabbatical he focused his research on Peripheral T cell Lymphoma (PTCL) and cutaneous T cells lymphoma (CTCL). Dr Steele’s current research focuses on investigating the role of B cell receptor (BCR) and T cell receptor (TCR) signalling and how microenvironmental signals regulate these pathways in B and T cell leukemia/lymphoma. Dr Steele has performed a number of studies with BCR kinase and Bcl-2 family inhibitors alone and in combination and is considered an expert in this area particularly around drug development and cell signalling involved in tumour cell death and survival.
Potential students, postdoctoral scientists or clinician scientists wishing to join his group are encouraged to contact Dr Steele.