Yiyuan Niu
Name: Yiyuan Niu
Nationality: Chinese
Academic Background: Bachelor of Engineering in Bioengineering, Northwest Agriculture & Forestry University, China
Master of Animal Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction Science, Northwest Agriculture & Forestry University, China
Project Title: Identification of novel oncogenic drivers and candidate drug targets in liver cancer
Project Background: Our parents always want to give the best thing to us. But they cannot make everything, biological inheritance, under their control. People might already have gotten pathogenic mutation which might result in cancer when they are born. In addition, these mutation also might happen after birth in our somatic cells. Unfortunately, in reality, people is powerless to avoid these mutations to happen. What's the worst is that most of the cancer cases around the world are because of the gene mutation. And most of people could not recognize the potential fatal mutations which happen with them. Therefore, if we could investigate and define the relevance and the chance of these mutations, people could find and get treatment at an early stage. This could increase the survival chance for cancer patients. Nowadays, genome sequencing at an early age becomes prevalent, which gives us huge amount of data for the candidates which might be the pathogenic mutations. So there is a great need for researchers to investigate these mutations and give a reference to doctor to help early cancer diagnosis. With that people could get an advice from hospital according to their genetic information. In addition, people also need to have a way to test the candidate drags for cancer. Therefore, our goal is to use genomic editing technology, CRISPR/Cas9 etc, to make clinical relevant model both in vitro and in vivo to study the relevance between genetic mutations and cancer and whether we could treat them.
Project Aims:
- To establish RSK2 as a novel tumor suppressor in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and test if it could be targeted.
- To develop a novel, accurate and scalable knockin assay (CRISPR-SurF), which can determine the effect of a cancer-associated mutation-of-interest on cell proliferation and/or survival. We are also planning to set up this assay method both in vivo and in vitro.
Expected Outcome:
- Establish a new assay method to investigate the effect of cancer-associated mutation-of-interest.
- Develop novel techniques for genome editing to create models in vitro and vivo.
Contact: yiyuan.niu@bric.ku.dk