Research Theme

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Tissue-Specific Carcinogenesis

Precision Cancer Medicine

Early Cancer Intervention

Precision Cancer Medicine (PCM) aims to make diagnosis of cancer simpler and more accurate and ultimately improve treatment. The PCM theme aims to focus research that will identify effective biomarkers, develop new treatment modalities for precision and personalized cancer therapy and create enabling technologies for accurate clinical diagnosis and treatment of specific cancer subtypes and individual cancer patients.

Theme Leads

A/Prof CHOW Kai-Hua, Edward

Research focus is on how to quickly and accurately identify effective cancer therapeutic options for individual cancer patients as well as specific sub-groups of cancer patients in both blood cancers and solid tumours.

A/Prof Glenn Kunnath BONNEY

Theme Members

Prof Dario CAMPANA

Research focus is on the development of innovative technologies to treat cancer with immune cells, and their translation into first-in human clinical trials.

Prof CHNG Wee Joo

Research focus is on blood cancers to understand how the disease develops and find better ways to treat them.

Dr Jit Kong CHEONG

Research focus is on uncovering and characterising novel signalling nodes of oncogenic RAS-driven human cancers to facilitate the development of tractable therapeutic modalities.

A/Prof Alfredo FRANCO-OBREGON

I approach tissue engineering, regeneration and development from a biophysical perspective, as an alternative to conventional pharmacological interventions. I am particularly interested in how mechanical and electromagnetic forces drive development and can be used to control disease. My areas of interest are skeletal muscle development, cancer and stem cell biology.

Dr Anand Devaprasath JEYASEKHARAN

Clinical research focuses on combinatorial drug therapy trials in lymphoma, and methods for evaluating cancer phenotypes for personalized treatment choice. Biological research focuses on understanding the signalling pathways involved in activation of immune responses after chemotherapy.

Dr Dennis KAPPEI

Research focus is on DNA-protein interactions and changes in chromatin composition by quantitative mass spectrometry. In particular, focus is on telomeres and their impact on genome stability as well as on related transcriptional regulation at (mutated) promoters or enhancers.

Prof KHONG Pek-Lan

Dr KONG Li Ren

Dr Alan Prem KUMAR

Research focus is on uncovering new cues that drive the spread of cancer and develop target-based precision therapies to prevent metastasis in several types of female reproductive cancers

Dr LIM Si Jing, Joline

Dr Jun Siong LOW

T and B cells are components of the immune system that are essential in fighting against infection-causing “foreign” pathogens, but are also involved in disease settings like cancer and autoimmunity where they can attack “self”. Our lab aims to understand the complex biology of T and B cells at the interplay of infection and cancer, by focusing on their phenotypic and functional profiles, antigen specificities and receptor repertoires. Our long-term goal is to develop rational and effective immune-based therapies to leverage on the immune system to fight cancer.

Dr NGOI Yan Li, Natalie

I am a Medical Oncologist with a keen interest in early drug development and personalized cancer medicine. My research areas of interest surround novel targets, synthetic lethal strategies and associated biomarker discovery for the treatment of Gynecologic Cancers.

Dr OOI Gaik Ming, Melissa

She is currently the leukaemia group lead in National University Cancer Institute of Singapore and is also heavily involved in myeloma, leukaemia and myelodysplasia clinical care and research. She is also interested in health service research and geriatric research.

A/Prof Gautam SETHI

Research focus is to elucidate the mechanism(s) of activation of oncogenic transcription factors and identification of novel inhibitors of these proteins for cancer prevention as well as therapy.

Dr SOON Yu Yang

Research focuses on evidence synthesis and clinical trials. Research goal is to improve health outcomes by synthesizing evidence to evaluate various health interventions to guide clinical practice and inform health policy.

Dr Sriram SRIDHARAN

My research focus is to study how DNA replication is a source of genome instability. I aim to understand why and how the (epi)genome acts as an impediment to faithful DNA replication.

Dr Raghav SUNDAR

Research focuses on identifying predictive biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets of systemic therapy in gastric cancer by incorporating contemporary technology such as spatial transcriptomics and machine-learning.

Dr TAI Yee Kit Alex

Research focus is on integrating non-invasive pulsed electromagnetic fields as a complement to conventional chemotherapy to improve treatment outcomes and the quality of life in patients.

Dr TAN Char Loo

Research focus is on brain and spinal cord tumours. Besides routine clinical diagnosis, she is also interested in neurooncology-related research.

Prof Daniel TENEN

Research focus is on gene regulation in normal cells and cancer, mainly in leukaemia, lung cancer, and liver cancer. Current interests are transcription factors, epigenetics, and weird long noncoding RNAs in these processes, as well as targeting the oncofoetal protein SALL4.

A/Prof TOO Heng-Phon

Research focus is on developing diagnostic tools to detect early changes in the development of cancers using small amounts of blood. We are now focusing on gene engineering of cells for treatment of cancers and other diseases.

Dr Balamurugan A VELLAYAPPAN

Research focus is on the use of advanced radiation technology, such as stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR/SBRT) and stereotactic radiosurgery, in the context of neuro-oncology and oligo-metastatic disease. Also interested in the use of novel imaging techniques (such as functional imaging, MR and artificial intelligence) to improve the delivery of radiation

A/Prof WANG Lingzhi

Research focus is on oncology drug development/evaluation pipeline that combines cell biology, pharmacological science, and pharmacokinetic analysis. Another important area of research is the discovery of non-invasive biomarkers for early detection of cancer in high-risk populations.

A/Prof YEOH Eng Juh, Allen

Research focus is on improving Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia treatment in children and adults by better prediction of each patient’s risk of relapse using highly sensitive biomarkers like RNA-Seq and MRD measurements. A/Prof Yeoh works on immune cell therapy especially CAR-T cell therapy for leukaemia with Prof Dario Campana in NUSMed.

Dr YONG Wei Peng

Prof Yang ZHANG

Research focus is on cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and deep-learning techniques, we are developing new methods for protein and RNA structure prediction and protein designs. We are particularly interested in the application of the AI-based computational methods for effective cancer therapeutics, with focuses on anti-cancer peptide-drug conjugates (PDCs) and T-cell receptor (TCR)-based adoptive therapy.

Dr ZHOU Jianbiao

Research focus is on the drug resistance mechanisms and aggressive phenotypes in hematologic malignancies, as well as the development predictive markers, novel therapeutic targets.