ABSTRACTFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Santu Saha is first author on ‘Bioengineering of a tumour-stroma 3D-tumouroid co-culture model of hypopharyngeal cancer’, published in BiO. Santu conducted the research described in this article while a Newton International Fellow of Academy of Medical Sciences (Research Associate) in Professor Nicola Curtin's lab at Newcastle University. He is now a Research Associate in the lab of Professor Christine Harrison at Leukaemia Research Cytogenetics Group at Newcastle University. He is a passionate early-career translational cancer researcher and his long-term research interest is in exploring gene – drug association based targeted cancer therapy through exploiting novel tools.