Professor Samira Lakhal-Littleton
About
Professor Samira Lakhal-Littleton leads a research team investigating the role of iron in health and disease. Specifically, the team investigates how iron levels change in the body in different settings such as during pregnancy or in heart failure. They also investigate the physiological and clinical consequences of those changes.
Professor Lakhal-Littleton completed a DPhil (doctorate) at Oxford University in 2007, then went on to take up her first postdoctoral research post with Professor Sir Peter Ratcliffe. Following that, she secured funding from the British Heart Foundation and the Medical Research Council and became an independent investigator at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford.
Her research has gained international recognition and many awards, including the Physiological Society’s Bayliss Starling Prize Lecture and the BioIron Society’s Gunshin Levy Award. She is also a tutorial fellow in Medicine at Brasenose College Oxford, and teaches physiology and cardiovascular sciences to pre-clinical students.
Expertise
- Iron deficiency
- Anaemia
- Heart failure
- Pregnancy
Selected publications
- Protective Role for Smooth Muscle Cell Hepcidin in Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (2023)
- The kidney hepcidin/ferroportin axis controls iron reabsorption and determines the magnitude of kidney and systemic iron overload (2021)
- Fetal liver hepcidin secures iron stores in utero (2020)
- Iron Deficiency as a Therapeutic Target in Cardiovascular Disease (2019)
- Intracellular iron deficiency in pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells induces pulmonary arterial hypertension in mice (2019)
- Iron-deficiency anemia reduces cardiac contraction by downregulating RyR2 channels and suppressing SERCA pump activity (2019)
- The interplay between iron and oxygen homeostasis with a particular focus on the heart (2017)
- The cardiac hepcidin/ferroportin axis is essential for cardiac iron homeostasis and function (2017)
Media experience
Professor Samira Lakhal-Littleton has media experience. As a child she was a presenter on Algerian national television, hosting weekly programmes on children's health and education in association with UNICEF (1995-1997). She has also been interviewed about her research, in Arabic and French, on national news and local radio in Algeria.
Languages
English, French, Arabic