Alireza Salem, MD
Research Assistant
Alireza Salem, MD, is a research assistant in the Gene Therapeutics Research Institute. After graduating from medical school in Iran, he served as a physician in various rural and urban clinical settings for two years and was responsible for improving general health care knowledge, managing common gastroenterological diseases, pulmonary disorders, and infectious diseases. He worked in outpatient clinics, inpatient wards, and emergency rooms. This experience enabled him to work effectively as part of a medical team, to communicate with members of the staff, and to provide leadership under difficult and challenging circumstances.
After immigrating to the United States in 2007, Dr. Salem obtained the necessary licensing to practice in the United States. He volunteered as a medical assistant in Heart & Rhythm Medical Group, in San Jose and was actively involved with the medical team in direct patient care and follow up, including histories and physical exams, interpreting thallium scans, heart stress test, CT angiograms, and angiographies.
Dr. Salem became ECFMG (Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates) certified and began working with Dr. Pedro Lowenstein and Dr. Maria Castro's gene therapy research team at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The team investigates the molecular and cellular immune-mediated mechanisms which elicit brain tumor regression with the ultimate goal of developing novel therapeutics and translating them into human clinical trials. He is currently studying the bio-distribution of the viral vector genomes throughout the body of gene therapy treated, tumor bearing rats.
On a day-to-day basis, Dr. Salem's research involves harvesting organs, DNA purification, and DNA quantity measurement from experimental animals which are part of a large pre-clinical experiment to test the bio-distribution and toxicity of the gene therapeutic vectors, before their implementation in human clinical trial for glioblastoma multiforme (GMB). He also works cutting brain sections and staining them with immuno-histochemistry methods and taking microphotographs in order to prepare figures for FDA submission and publications. This enables the team to assess the neuro-pathological impact of the successful gene therapy in tumor bearing preclinical animal models.
Dr. Salem is a graduate of the -Islamic Azad University (Tehran-Iran) School of Medicine where he earned a Medical Doctorate Degree.
