Our current research interests focus on 2 major fields of Functional Genomics of Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) and Population/Pharmaco-genetics. In the field of HCC, our laboratory is interested in employing next-generation genetic, molecular, cellular and computational approaches to elucidate clinically important genes, lncRNAs, miRNAs, circRNAs that are dysregulated in HCC and associated with poorer prognosis. One of the genes that our laboratory identified to be highly over-expressed in HCC is FAT10, the gene in this proposal. Our laboratory is the first to show that FAT10 is over-expressed in HCC and other inflammation-associated cancers and we also identified that it plays a role in tumorigenesis through interacting non-covalently with MAD2 to delocalize MAD2 from the kinetochore causing aneuploidy and ultimately tumorigenesis. We are in the process of investigating the role of FAT10 in linking inflammation and metabolism in cancer.

In the field of Population/Pharmaco-genetics, our laboratory is interested in identifying functionally important polymorphisms that are associated with drug response. Integrating potentially functional SNP resource developed in our laboratory with gene-pathway information and analyzing population differences of SNPs, we develop an algorithm to identify drug/drug groups that potentially exhibit population differences in response using SNP data mining and analytics. We are in the process of validating the algorithm with real-world clinical data and incorporating deep learning/AI to improve the algorithm of predicting drug response.