Happy to share our new review paper on ‘Organoids as research models for hepatocellular carcinoma’ published in Experimental Cell Research. A great way to wrap up 2021. Congrats to Justin, our MRes(Med) student, on his very first paper!

Happy to share our new Cancer Research paper from a fruitful collaboration with Dr. Alan Wong’s team. Thank you Alan for leading this project and for involving us. Congrats to the two co-first authors Xu Feng and Carol!




Click here for the full article.

Very happy to see our work on FSTL1+ CAFs in driving HCC stemness and metastasis finally published in the most recent issue of Cancer Research. Also out is our recently published and related mini-review article on the role of CAFs in the maintenance of stemness in the tumor microenviornment. Very well done, JJ, Carol, Natalie, and the team. We also thank our collaborators for their support.

Read the Cancer Research and Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology articles here.

Stepped out of our comfort zone and explored into lineage tracing and scRNA-seq. Years of hard work with great preserverance from our three leading authors Lena, Ken and Eric; and a wonderful collaboration with Dr. Joshua Ho. Excited to share our lab’s latest work published in Gut.

Lineage tracing and single-cell analysis reveal proliferative Prom1+ tumor-propagating cells and their dynamic cellular transition during liver cancer progression – read all about it here!

It’s finally out! Check out our review in Nature Reviews Gastroenterology and Hepatology detailing the most updated knowledge of liver cancer stem cell biology. Thanks to the authors involved. Truly a pleasure to be able to work with NatRevGastroHep. Read here.

Happy to share our lab’s latest work published in the Aug 24 2021 issue of Cell Reports. Loss of tyrosine catabolic enzyme HPD promotes glutamine anaplerosis through mTOR signaling in liver cancer. Great work by Carol with collaborations from Zongwei Cai’s group of Baptist University in Hong Kong. Open access here.

Thrilled to announce our new paper published in the June 1 2021 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Read about our findings on how FUT1 mediates fucoyslation of membrane-bound proteins, including CD147, EGFR, ICAM-1 and EPHA2, to drive cancer stemness in a glucose-deprived HCC microenvironment. Congrats to Jane and the team! Link to full article here.

Congrats to Johnson and the team! Our paper “Chemotherapy enriched THBS2-deficient cancer stem cells drive hepatocarcinogenesis through matrix softness induced histone H3 modifications” is accepted for publication in Advanced Science.

Findings of this study show that extracellular matrix remodeling by chemotherapy 5-FU enriched THBS2-deficient CD133 cancer stem cells can provide a route of escape that leads to HCC metastasis. In brief, 5-FU enriches for CD133 expressing cells with deficient THBS2 expression. THBS2, which is a known extracellular matrix (ECM)-modifying protein, has the ability to alter MMP2/MMP9 activity and thus collagen and matrix stiffness, which leads to altered cancer and stemness properties. This local soft microenvironment then induces mechano-epigenetic changes to enhance CD133 expression and suppress THBS2 expression through histone H3 modifications at their respective promoter regions, facilitating a positive feedback loop that supports the clonogenic expansion of a subpopulation of HCC cells with high CD133 expression and low THBS2 expression.

Congrats to Noel, Johnson, and the team! Read all about our story on how PRMT6 deficiency promotes autophagy in hostile HCC microenvironments via regulating BAG5/HSC70 to be soon published in Cancer Letters.

April 2020 – Our work on “CRAF methylation by PRMT6 regulates aerobic glycolysis driven hepatocarcinogenesis via ERK-dependent PKM2 nuclear relocalization and activation” was commented by Drs. Amaia Navarro-Corcuera and Robert E Schwartz and featured in Hepatology Highlights.