The laboratory is focused on translational research projects in lung and pancreatic cancer, two of the most deadly cancers with overall five-year survival rates of 15% and 2-5%, respectively. Greater understanding of the molecular basis of their malignancy will provide insights for improving the early diagnosis and treatment against these diseases.

The primary goals of our lung cancer projects are to identify novel genes or proteins that are better than clinical predictors alone in predicting clinical outcome or response to therapies. We profile the gene expression and genomic aberrations of a large number of human lung cancer samples using microarray techniques, apply computational bioinformatic algorithms to identify the predictive genes or gene signatures, and validate them by realtime quantitative PCR technique. The biological functions of the predictive genes are then studied using in vitro lung cancer cell line model, primary lung cancer xenograft models and orthotopic rodent models of human lung cancers.