Wickramasinghe Lab

Messenger RNA (or mRNA) is part of the central dogma of biology. RNA is enjoying a renaissance in both biology and medicine due to the efficacy of mRNA based therapeutics in treating COVID and holds tremendous promise for treating many diseases, including cancer.

We have a fundamental interest in uncovering how RNAs are transported from the nucleus to the cytoplasm and how this is altered in human disease.

While mRNA export is critical for gene expression, we and others have uncovered that mRNA export pathways are systematically amplified in cancer.

Through leveraging our curiosity driven work on export of mRNA from the nucleus and circular RNA, we are developing new RNA targeting therapies to treat cancer. 

For more information, see:  wickramasinghelab.com

We are interested in many aspects of RNA biology, including RNA splicing, processing and export. We are interested in how transcription is coupled to mRNA export and how RNAs are transported within the nucleus through different nuclear domains.

While our lab is unshamedly fundamental in nature, our efforts to develop first-in-class inhibitors of mRNA export to treat cancer have resulted in the spin-out of a company with Professor Guillaume Lessene with significant venture capital funding.

Our laboratory has made fundamentally important discoveries with translational potential.

For example, we have discovered how different subtypes of RNA, such as circular RNAs are exported from the nucleus (Ngo et al., Nature, 2024).

In collaboration with the Dawson Lab at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, we have uncovered a role for mRNA export factors in storing mRNAs in nuclear speckles in response to global inhibition of transcription (Williams, Michalak et al, Molecular Cell, 2025).

We continue to uncover how RNA export can regulate different biological processes in the cell.