Alicia Sanoyca

Biography:

Alicia Sanoyca earned her BS in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Driven by an interest in next-generation therapeutics, she worked at Genentech, where she gained hands-on experience in early-stage pharmaceutical research and development. She joined the Patil lab in 2026 as a PhD student, studying microbial metabolite immunoregulation.

Research interests:

The human gut microbiome functions as a biological "black box" that significantly impacts many aspects of human health and disease. Alicia is particularly interested in elucidating how gut microbes and their metabolites can modulate immunologically "cold" tumours through regulation of the tumour microenvironment (TME). Her PhD research focuses on the mechanistic pathways of microbial metabolite immunoregulation to better understand its role in cancer progression and to optimise therapeutic outcomes.