Biography
Biography: Jianhua Luo
Abstract
Cancer remains one of the most lethal diseases for human. In recent studies, genomic analysis has rapidly advanced the diagnostics of human cancers. Our result showed that combination of genome copy number variance, genome methylation pattern and novel fusion transcripts specific for cancer achieved high accuracy in predicting clinical outcomes of human cancers. Interestingly, some of these fusion genes are also present in a variety of human malignancies. Some of these fusion gene products trigger new pathways that are essential for carcinogenesis in multiple human cancers, and create novel functions that are not present in wild type gene counterparts. Some of these novel fusion genes are highly targetable. Treatment of cancers with drugs specific for these genes and their signaling pathways produced dramatic improvement of metastasis and survival rate of animals xenografted with cancers positive for these fusion genes. Our analyses suggest that targeting therapy for fusion genes holds promise as an effective treatment for human cancers.