Research Theme

Early Cancer Intervention (ECI) focuses on understanding how cell autonomous and non-cell autonomous changes contribute to cancer initiation and relapse post-treatment with the goal of developing innovative approaches to delay, prevent or treat cancer at its earliest stages.

Theme Leads

Prof Ashok VENKITARAMAN

Theme Lead

Research focus is on deciphering the mechanisms underlying cancer susceptibility to intercept cancer evolution.

A/Prof Polly CHEN

Theme Lead

Research focus is on identifying how the harmful changes that occur in RNA molecules trigger a cell to develop into cancer which can eventually lead to the unsatisfactory treatment outcomes for patients with cancers. The long-term goal of Dr Chen’s team is to develop novel cancer therapies targeting these cancer-associated RNA changes.

Theme Members

A/Prof CHEN Ee Sin

A/Prof CHEN Zhi Xiong

Neuroblastoma is the leading cause of cancer death in children. Our research is to develop improved approaches for treating neuroblastoma through drug repurposing and predicting outcome in paediatric tumours through blood sample monitoring.

A/Prof Peter GOON

Research focus is on novel work identification of promising biomarkers in early diagnosis of pre-cancer and early cancer.

A/Prof Mikael HARTMAN

Research focus on epidemiology and breast cancer. Currently working on the development of artificial intelligence for breast cancer detection.

Dr Anthony KHONG

The Khong lab aspires to describe how biomolecular condensates participate in cancer biology with the goal of developing cancer therapeutics

Prof LEE Soo Chin

Research focuses on novel therapeutics and predictive biomarkers in breast cancer. Her team has identified a biomarker detectable in blood that predicts breast cancer recurrence, and that can be used to select patients for a novel targeted therapy.

Dr Jason PITT

Research focus is on generating and applying computational methods to understand the causes and consequences of genomic instability in cancer. Additionally, we develop innovative genomic data democratization platforms to enhance scientific discovery as well as precision oncology.

Dr Elayanambi SUNDARAMOORTHY

My research investigates whether metabolic dysregulation could be a driver for early carcinogenesis, whether physiological triggers of metabolic stress can drive cancer initiation and also metabolism driven carcinogenesis in breast cancers, specially in cancers associated with BRCA2.

Prof SO Bok Yan, Jimmy

Research focus is to improve outcomes of patients with gastric or esophageal cancer through early detection, better understanding of their origins and novel treatment.

A/Prof TAM Kit Chung, John

A/Prof TAM Wai Leong

Research focus is on harnessing functional genomics to understand dysregulation in cellular metabolism and cell state perturbations for revealing principles of cancer stemness, resistance and metastasis.

A/Prof TAN Ker Kan

A/Prof TAY Mei Sian, Yvonne

Research focuses on understanding the role of non-coding RNAs that play a part in cancer development and exploring their potential utility as diagnostic biomarkers and targeted therapeutics for precision medicine.

Prof John WONG

Research focus is on medical oncology / hematology, particularly in breast and prostate cancer. 

Dr Rajeev PARAMESWARAN

Focus of research is to investigate how specific genomic alterations seen in various thyroid cancer phenotypes contribute to aberrant glycan formation that may be associated with thyroid cancer progression and metastasis. Also interested in developing glycan markers to help differentiate between the low-risk and high-risk thyroid cancers preoperatively.