Dr Who-Whong WANG
Dr Timothy SHUEN
Dr Esdy bin ROZALI
Chit Lai CHEE
Chloe YEO
Lip Seng KOH
Nur Syazwani SALIM
Charmaine TAN
Janice LIM
Rachael CHEONG
Rebecca BA
Our laboratory is mainly involved in cancer immunology and immunotherapy for solid cancers. We have developed clinical cell-based immunotherapeutic strategies, including dendritic cell vaccines and adoptive transfer of Epstein Barr Virus (EBV)-specific T cells, and successfully completed immunotherapy clinical trials for colorectal cancer and EBV-associated cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). For example, our published phase II clinical trial of autologous EBV-specific T cell treatment in 38 advanced NPC patients— showed very encouraging clinical benefit and survival outcomes, and this led to a collaboration with a Singaporean biotechnology company, Tessa Therapeutics, to embark on an FDA IND international multi-centre randomised phase III clinical trial in 330 NPC patients across 30 sites in 5 countries. In collaboration with a U.S. biotech company, we have also recently completed a first-in-human phase I trial of Ad-sig-hMUC-1/ecdCD40L cancer vaccine in epithelial cancers, including lung, breast, colon, ovary, and prostate cancers. Our laboratory is also a participant in a phase III randomised, open-label study comparing Pexa-Vec (vaccinia GMCSF/thymidine kinase-deactivated virus) followed by Sorafenib versus Sorafenib alone in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Another ongoing effort is in the pre-clinical development of novel gamma-delta T (gdT) lymphocyte-based immunotherapy strategies, for which a patent has been filed for a proprietary GMP gdT cell production method.
Another key focus of our laboratory is to develop novel treatment strategies against HCC, focusing on gaining a deeper understanding of the interaction between the tumour and the immune system to more rationally design effective combination immunotherapies. GATA4, is a key gene that we have reported as central to oncogenesis. We are elucidating the biological pathways associated with GATA4 and its influence on the tumour microenvironment to uncover potential anti-cancer targets related to this central transcription factor. We have been awarded more than four national grants in past 4 years to establish new in vitro and in vivo liver cancer models to delineate the molecular mechanisms of GATA4, to investigate the genomic and immune heterogeneity in HCC, and to rationally design and test new combination immunotherapies.
Selected publications
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