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Professor Ruby Huang

Professor Ruby Huang

Professor Ruby Huang

rubyhuang@ntu.edu.tw

Professor Ruby Yun-Ju Huang obtained her MD degree from National Taiwan University (NTU) in 1999 and completed the residency training of Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2003 and subspecialty fellowship training of gynecologic/surgical oncology in National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) in 2006. During that time, she discovered her strong interest in research and started her PhD study in the Graduate Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology of NTU in 2004. She decided to work as a clinician scientist with a focus in gynecologic oncology and specifically in ovarian cancer (OC). In 2006, she was awarded the FIGO / BSP Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and joined Prof. Nelly Auersperg’s lab in University of British Columbia (UBC) to study epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of human ovarian surface epithelium (OSE). She obtained her PhD degree from NTU in 2008. Her postdoctoral studies with Prof. Jean Paul Thiery at Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) in Singapore (2007-2009) led her to cancer genomics and translational research, focusing on the genomic alterations of and the mechanism of early events during epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). She subsequently joined the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the National University Hospital (NUH) of Singapore and the Cancer Science Institute (CSI) of Singapore of National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2009 until 2019. She returned to NTU in April 2019 under the Yushan Young Scholar Program supported by Ministry of Education in Taiwan among the top talents in this global recruitment program. She is currently a Visiting Professor in Department of O&G in NUS.

Professor Ruby Yun-Ju Huang is a renowned clinician scientist in the international ovarian cancer and EMT research field. She is best known to define the early events of EMT and to propose the paradigm shift of the EMT concept from binary to a continuous spectrum. By using big data analysis of 13,000+ cancer gene expression profiles, her group pioneered in establishing EMT signatures and defining the EMT scoring. She is also the main contributor of the two seminal review articles in the field of EMT and the recent guideline in EMT research, which has accumulated citations up to 9,000+ times. She has pioneered in the understanding of the underlying biology of the gene expression molecular subtypes (GEMS) in OC. She has demonstrated that each of these molecular subtypes has distinct biology driven by specific mechanisms. These mechanisms include the non-canonical FZD7-Wnt pathway in the OC subtype having a stem-cell property; the epithelial gatekeeper role of GRHL2 in OC; the dependency of AXL signaling pathway in the mesenchymal subtype of OC. These diverse mechanisms also result to the differences in therapeutic responses to chemotherapeutic or targets agents. Recently, her group further deciphered the intra-tumoral heterogeneity to guide personalized medicine in OC by using a Molecular Assessment of Subtype Heterogeneity (MASH) scheme.

Publications

  1. Chung, V. Y., Tan, T. Z., Ye, J., Huang, R. L., Lai, H. C., Kappei, D., Wollmann, H., Guccione, E., & Huang, R. Y. (2019). The role of GRHL2 and epigenetic remodeling in epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity in ovarian cancer cells. Communications biology, 2, 272. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-019-0506-3
  2. Antony, J., Tan, T. Z., Kelly, Z., Low, J., Choolani, M., Recchi, C., Gabra, H., Thiery, J. P., & Huang, R. Y. (2016). The GAS6-AXL signaling network is a mesenchymal (Mes) molecular subtype-specific therapeutic target for ovarian cancer. Science signaling, 9(448), ra97. https://doi.org/10.1126/scisignal.aaf8175
  3. Tan, T. Z., Miow, Q. H., Miki, Y., Noda, T., Mori, S., Huang, R. Y., & Thiery, J. P. (2014). Epithelial-mesenchymal transition spectrum quantification and its efficacy in deciphering survival and drug responses of cancer patients. EMBO molecular medicine, 6(10), 1279–1293. https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.201404208
  4. Huang, R. Y., Wong, M. K., Tan, T. Z., Kuay, K. T., Ng, A. H., Chung, V. Y., Chu, Y. S., Matsumura, N., Lai, H. C., Lee, Y. F., Sim, W. J., Chai, C., Pietschmann, E., Mori, S., Low, J. J., Choolani, M., & Thiery, J. P. (2013). An EMT spectrum defines an anoikis-resistant and spheroidogenic intermediate mesenchymal state that is sensitive to e-cadherin restoration by a src-kinase inhibitor, saracatinib (AZD0530). Cell death & disease, 4(11), e915. https://doi.org/10.1038/cddis.2013.442
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