Meet Prof Sarki Abba Abdulkadir: One of the Best Medical Doctors in the World.

Professor Sarki Abba Abdulkadir is a world-renowned pathologist and distinguished Abusite who is rated among the world-leading medical doctors in the history of the present time.

He is a John T. Grayhack Professor of Urological Research, Vice Chair for Research, and Professor of Urology and Pathology and a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

Born and raised in Kano state, the story of Professor Sarki Abba Abdulkadir, a product of Dawakin Tofa Science College is a unique one. It began In the cold harmattan of 1984, when he did what was considered unthinkable!

He scored 9 distinctions (8 A1 and 1 A2) in his West African Senior School Certificate (WASC) Exams. This achievement seemed unrealistic and never happened at the time which made the authorities at WAEC Headquarters in Lagos to assumed it was a case of cheating.

To unveil this mystery, a car was sent to pick up 16yr old Sarki Abba straight from Dawakin TOFA where he was made to retake the whole nine exams in 3 days.

After marking the rescheduled exams, Sarki Abba Abdulkadir scored nine A1 (the only ‘A2’ he had in the English Language before the retake, became ‘A1’ resulted in nine A1)

Faced with disbelief and surprise, the Lagos authorities apologized and when the National Merit Award was subsequently instituted, Sarki Abba became its first recipient.

Sarki Abba Abdulkadir was Admitted into the prestigious Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria where at the young age of 21, he graduated as the OVERALL BEST Medical Student, and OVERALL BEST Graduating Student in 1989.

Sarki was subsequently invited to the U.S.A where he earned a PhD in immunology from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as a fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and has continued live study and work.

Sarki Abba is presently a Professor of Urology and Pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, USA. Also, MD, Ph.D., at the John T. Grayhack Professor of Urological Research.

He undertook a combined clinical pathology residency and postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and served as a faculty member in pathology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and at Vanderbilt before coming to Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in 2013.

Prof. Sarki Abba Abdulkadir’s research program is focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms that drive cancer initiation, progression, and recurrence with the ultimate goal of developing therapies that interfere with these processes.

His work has particularly focused on prostate cancer. He has a strong interest in genomics and gene regulation; oncogenic kinases as molecular therapeutic targets; as well as the use of in vivo lineage tracing to define the fates of specific cell populations in tumorigenesis.

His work has shed light on the cellular origins of prostate cancer, cancer gene cooperation in tumorigenesis, and the development of novel therapeutic agents currently in preclinical and clinical development.

Along with his collaborators, Abdulkadir has identified mutated proteins that that help initiate prostate cancer, and designed small molecules to block these cancer-causing proteins.

Abdulkadir has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and is currently the principal investigator on three National Institutes of Health grants; two R01 awards and a P50 award.

The latter is part of the Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in prostate cancer at the Lurie Cancer Center, a five-year $11 million grant that aims to take basic science research from bench to bedside in just five years.

He has also won Hundreds of Awards and Prizes in the cause of his work. Including most recently the 2020 Tripartite Legacy Faculty Prize in Translational Science and Education.

Professor Sarki Abba Abdulkadir is committed to mentorship and this explains why students trained by Abdulkadir have gone on to make striking discoveries of their own.

Abdulkadir mentee Jonathan Anker, ’20 MD, ’18 PhD, graduate of the Driskill Graduate Training Program in Life Sciences, recently discovered that a unique bacterial strain isolated from a patient with pelvic pain may represent a promising path to treating prostate cancer with immunotherapy.