Speakers - CWC 2023

Biography

During my Ph.D. training, I developed a combined prokaryotic-eukaryotic delivery and expression system for generating therapeutic factors through an autocatalytic feedback loop, which has already been applied to cancer immunotherapy. Based on these studies, we granted two US patents and published 10 research papers. My co-founder and I  further got the investments and successfully incorporated a pharmaceutical company Sal Vectors developing bacteria-based cancer immunotherapies for canines and humans. During my research training at the University of Hong Kong, I unraveled the functions of Sirtuins and HDACs in cancer stem cells metastasis and also conducted genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9-mediated high throughput screens to identify the key drivers in multi-organ site metastases, which may provide a basis for developing effective therapies (Nature Communications 2017 and 2021, Oncogene 2018). Since I joined MD Anderson in 2018, I have been actively engaged in several projects that have resulted in nine published manuscripts (two served as first-author in the leading journal Cancer Cell and PNAS) and collaborated with IACS scientists, and led in vitro and in vivo validation activities and translational PK/PD assessment for exploratory oncology targets.