Research Areas of Interest:

My recent interests have been focused on the role of chronic stress (environmental and psychological) and stress hormones in breast cancer development and progression. Developing a research program into stress and stress relieving practices (either pharmacological or environmental or health policy related) I believe would be impactful in cancer prevention. I now am involved in three external projects with colleagues from nursing and psychological medicine understanding the impact of stress and interventions such as mindfulness, forest walking and choral singing on disease and quality of life. I have published one scientific and one clinical paper on stress, and there are two more in progress.
Specific projects my lab is focused on now are innate immunity-based projects on (1) the importance of Annexin-A1 in STING-dependent antitumor responses in the tumor microenvironment, which leads on from my previous work on alternatively activated macrophages in the tumor microenvironment and (2) differential responses to influenza after pre-exposure to coronaviruses. This stems from an observation in the early days of the COVID pandemic that no or minimal influenza infections were observed, while other respiratory viruses such as RSV were still evident during the pandemic. Our hypothesis is that there could be an immune dependent or interferon dependent cross-talks between influenza and coronaviruses immune responses, and we will use mouse models and human PBMCs to begin to understand these mechanisms.

Selected Publications

1. Foo SL, Sachaphibulkij K, Lee CLY, Yap GLR, Cui J, Arumugam T, Lim LHK. Breast cancer metastasis to brain results in recruitment and activation of microglia through annexin-A1/formyl peptide receptor signaling. Breast Cancer Research. 2022
2. Chua SCJH, Cui J, Engelberg D, Lim LHK. A Review and Meta-Analysis of Influenza Interactome Studies. Frontiers in Microbiology. 2022
3. Ng GY, Sheng DPLK, Bae HG, Kang SW, Fann DY, Park J, Kim J, Alli-Shaik A, Lee J, Kim E, Park S, Han JW, Karamyan V, Okun E, Dheen T, Hande MP, Vemuganti R, Mallilankaraman K, Lim LHK, Kennedy BK, Drummond GR, Sobey CG, Gunaratne J, Mattson MP, Foo RS, Jo DG, Arumugam TV. Integrative epigenomic and transcriptomic analyses reveal metabolic switching by intermittent fasting in brain. GeroScience. 2022
4. Srinivas US, Tay NSC, Jaynes P, Anbuselvan A, Ramachandran GK, Wardyn JD, Hoppe MM, Hoang PM, Peng Y, Lim S, Lee MY, Peethala PC, An O, Shendre A, Tan BWQ, Jemimah S, Lakshmanan M, Hu L, Jakhar R, Sachaphibulkij K, Lim LHK, Pervaiz S, Crasta K, Yang H, Tan P, Liang C, Ho L, Khanchandani V, Kappei D, Yong WP, Tan DSP, Bordi M, Campello S, Tam WL, Frezza C, Jeyasekharan AD. PLK1 inhibition selectively induces apoptosis in ARID1A deficient cells through uncoupling of oxygen consumption from ATP production. Oncogene. 2022
5. Cui J, Sachaphibulkij K, Teo WS, Lim HM, Zou L, Ong CN, Alberts R, Chen J, Lim LHK. Annexin-A1 deficiency attenuates stress-induced tumor growth via fatty acid metabolism in mice: an Integrated multiple omics analysis on the stress microbiome- metabolite-epigenetic-oncology (SMMEO) axis. Theranostics. 2022