Professor Shishir Shetty FRCP PhD

• Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians, 2017
• PhD Immunology, University of Birmingham 2011
• Membership of the Royal College of Physicians, 2002
• MbChB, Leicester 1999

Professor Shishir Shetty graduated in Medicine from the University of Leicester in 1999. He underwent general medical training in Liverpool followed by specialisation in Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Royal Free in London and then the West Midlands Deanery. In 2007 he obtained a BRET-CORE fellowship to undertake a PhD in the laboratory of Professor David Adams in Birmingham. During his PhD he discovered that the scavenger receptor CLEVER-1/stabilin-1 was a hepatic adhesion molecule for regulatory T cells.

In recognition of this work he was awarded the Dame Sheila Sherlock research medal from the British Association for the Study of the Liver in 2013 and the CORE charity research prize. On completing his specialist medical training he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellowship in 2012 and appointed as Honorary Consultant Hepatologist at the Queen Elizabeth Liver transplant unit in Birmingham. The work during his intermediate fellowship led to the discovery that CLEVER-1/stabilin-1 plays a critical role in liver fibrosis and remodelling.

In recognition of this work he was awarded the United European Gastroenterology Rising Star Award and the Lancet Young Investigator Award in 2017. In 2019, Shishir was awarded an Advanced Clinician Scientist Fellowship from CRUK to study the role of scavenger receptors in hepatocellular cancer.

• BMedSc - Medical Science

Professor Shetty is interested in supervising doctoral research students in the following areas:

• Lymphocyte adhesion and migration via hepatic endothelium.
• Lymphocyte subset recruitment to the inflamed liver.
• The role of C-type lectins in chronic liver disease and primary liver cancer.

If you are interesting in studying any of these subject areas please contact Professor Shishir Shetty directly, or for any general doctoral research enquiries, please email mds-gradschool@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

For a full list of available Doctoral Research opportunities, please visit our Doctoral Research programme listings.

Research interests

Professor Shetty studies the development of cancer in the setting of chronic inflammation with a focus on hepatocellular cancer (HCC). There is now strong evidence that for cancer to develop and grow it has to evade the immune system and promote a tissue microenvironment that prevents immune eradication. HCC develops on the background chronic liver disease in the vast majority of patients. HCC therefore grows in a complex multicellular environment which involves inflammation, fibrosis and epithelial transformation. The clinical challenge is to find new immunotherapies for HCC which can eradicate the tumour but do not exacerbate the underlying liver inflammation. Our previous work on the molecule stabilin-1/CLEVER-1 highlights that scavenger receptors play distinct homeostatic roles in the setting of tissue injury and therefore may be attractive targets for cancer immunotherapy. Scavenger receptors are highly expressed by endothelial cells and macrophages and this has led us to study the contribution of these cell types to the tumour microenvironment.

Current projects

HUNTER CRUK Accelerator 2019-2024

Professor Shetty is part of the HUNTER collaboration, made up of groups from the UK, Spain and Italy to advance the knowledge of the immune microenvironment of HCC. Their focus in Birmingham is on characterising tumour endothelial cells and their contribution to immune cell recruitment.

CRUK Advanced Clinical Scientist Fellowship 2020-2025

This fellowship aims to understand how scavenger receptors regulate the tumour microenvironment and their potential as novel immunotherapies.

Wellcome MIDAS project

The role of atypical adhesion molecules on liver endothelium expressed on hepatic endothelium in regulating the immune microenvironment during liver injury.

Current studentships

lifeTIME CDT PhD studentship 2021-2025 – Developing models to test immunotherapies for liver disease and liver cancer.

CRUK Clinical Fellowship 2021-2024 - The role of CD73 in hepatocellular cancer.

• Member of the Steering Committee for the MATINS Global multicentre Phase I/II trial.