Benjamin Yatming YungChair Professor

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Throughout these years, we have been focusing our effort and making important progress on the study of the nucleolar protein nucleophosmin/B23 (NPM) and its biological role in cancer. In recent review on NPM and cancer by Grisendi et al (Nature Reviews 6, 493-505, 2006), fifteen (~10%) out of 146 manuscripts being sited are from our previous and current work on NPM. It is evident that we have established a unique, novel system and strong background of NPM. Most importantly, recent findings from our laboratory have identified a potential but mostly uncharacterized role of NPM in transcriptional regulation (EMBO Report, 8:394-400, 2007; Cellular Signaling 18:2041-2048, 2006; BBRC 335:826-831, 2005). It prompts us to continue our study to advance our functional and mechanistic understanding of NPM’s transcriptional roles and further expand our view on the link between gene expression regulation (or mis-regulation) and tumorigenesis. It is conceivable that we are able to establish an integrated, functional genomic-based system that will aid us in exploring an in-depth and global understanding of the roles of transcriptional regulators within a physiological and/or pathological context. Department of Health Technology and Informatics, PolyU 2 We have also set up a multidisciplinary platform that integrates computational biology and clinical genomics for genome-wide cancer study. We have developed a novel bioinformatics approach that computes the transcriptome-wide gene co-expression network of cancer, and identifies cancerspecific interruption of gene co-expressions. In addition to uncover new biological insight into cancer pathology, the gene co-expression discoveries are valuable for the development of cancer biomarkers and theupeutic targets. In parallel to cancer study, we also apply the co-expression strategy for the investigation of metabolic syndrome as a risk factor of cancer. We mainly focus on the genomic investigation of Hong Kong and Chinese population in order to gain racially relevant information for cancer prediction, diagnostics and treatment decision of the local.