Jianhua Luo
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, USA
Biography
Jianhua Luo has been studying Molecular Pathology related to human malignancies from the last 25 years. Currently, he is a Professor of Pathology and Director of High Throughput Genome Center at University of Pittsburgh. In the last 17 years, he has been largely focusing on the genetic and molecular mechanism of human prostate and hepatocellular carcinomas. In this period, his group has identified and characterized several genes that are related to prostate cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma, including SAPC, myopodin, CSR1, GPx3, ITGA7, MCM7, MT1h and GPC3. He has characterized several signaling pathways that play critical role in prostate cancer development. He is one of the pioneers in utilizing high throughput gene expression and genome analyses to analyze field effects in prostate cancer and liver cancer. He is also the first in using methylation array and whole genome methylation sequencing to analyze prostate cancer. His group found that patterns of copy number variants of certain specific genome loci are predictive of prostate cancer clinical outcomes, regardless tissue origin. Recently, his group discovered several novel fusion transcripts and their association with aggressive prostate cancer. One of the fusion genes called MAN2A1-FER, was found present in 6 different types of human cancers. He later defined a critical MAN2A1-FER/EGFR signaling pathway that is essential for MAN2A1-FER mediated transformation activity. In addition, his group developed a genome intervention approach to treat human cancers that are positive for fusion gene.
Abstract
Abstract : 11:20-11:50