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Professor Ruby Huang – National Taiwan University

06/02/2025 1:30 pm - 06/02/2025 2:30 pm
Location
L7W Seminar Room

WEHI Special ACRF Cancer Biology & Stem Cells Seminar hosted by Dr Holly Barker

 

Professor Ruby Huang

Professor of the School of Medicine, National Taiwan University

 

Neighborhood matters: Spatial Profiling of Intra-tumour Heterogeneity in Ovarian Clear Cell Carcinoma

L7W Seminar Room

Join via TEAMS

Including Q&A session

 

Neighborhoods are important contexts across multiple disciplines. In human behavior, neighborhoods matter in shaping the social processes. In economic development, neighborhoods matter in determining community prosperity. This "neighborhood matters" concept also applies to solid tumors. Clonal heterogeneity in tumor cells and their associated microenvironments could create community effects within tumors and even dictate their treatment responses. Identification of specific niche neighborhoods within tumors thus becomes a crucial task. In this talk, I will show how spatial profiling technologies could be utilized to identify niche neighborhoods encompassing potential founder clones of tumor cells and their associated microenvironments in ovarian clear cell carcinoma, a cancer subtype with high incidence among East Asian women. The presence of this niche neighborhood could be further examined across different spatial profiling platforms to confirm its generalizability.

Professor Ruby Yun-Ju Huang is a renowned clinician scientist in the international ovarian cancer (OC) research and the field of EMT (epithelial-mesenchymal transition). As a clinician-scientist, her research interest is in the plasticity of biological systems. In the field of EMT, she is best known to define the early events of EMT and to propose the paradigm shift of the EMT concept from binary to a continuous spectrum. By using big data analysis of 13,000+ cancer gene expression profiles, her group pioneered in establishing EMT signatures and defining the EMT scoring. She utilized ovarian cancer as the working model to decipher the role of EMT spectrum in tumoral heterogeneity focusing on the function of an epithelial gatekeeper GRHL2. Recently, her group further pioneers the understanding of how this EMT spectrum is regulated at the 3D genome level.

Professor Huang obtained her MD degree from National Taiwan University (NTU) in 1999 and is a board certified Obs & Gyn Specialist. She obtained her PhD degree in Anatomy and Cell Biology from NTU in 2008. She was recruited back to NTU in 2019 under the global talent recruitment program Yushan Scholar Program supported by Ministry of Education in Taiwan. She is currently Professor of the School of Medicine of NTU.

 

 

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