Caroline Lee

Affiliations

• Associate Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS.
• Principal Investigator, National Cancer Centre.
• Associate Professor, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School.
• Supervisor, NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS).

Caroline Lee graduated with PhD from Baylor College of Medicine and did her post-doctoral training with Dr. Michael Gottesman at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. She currently also holds joint appointment as Principal Investigator at the National Cancer Centre as well as an Associate Professor at the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Program at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School. She has ~100 peer reviewed publications and research focuses on the functional genomics of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and pharmacogenetics. Her laboratory identified FAT10 as a molecule that is over-expressed in HCC and other inflammation associated cancers and demonstrated it plays a role in TNF-α induced chromosome instability. Employing next-generation sequencing (NGS), the laboratory has also characterized HBV in 48 HCC patients and found that integration of HBV into chromosome 10 is associated with poor prognosis. Using, chromatin immunoprecipitation coupled with microarray/NGS, the laboratory has demonstrated that HBX, a protein of HBV can modulate the binding of p53, an important ‘guardian-of-the-genome’ to the regulatory region of genes. Another strong research program in her laboratory is mining the human genome databases to identify polymorphisms that have potential to be functionally important to facilitate the association with diseases and drug response. Her laboratory identified signatures of recent positive selection in the drug transporter gene(s) and demonstrated that these polymorphisms may represent important polymorphisms that may change the function of the gene. The laboratory has developed a comprehensive, well-annotated, integrated potentially functional SNP (pfSNP) web-resource that facilitates better hypothesis generation through knowledge synthesis mediated by better data integration and a user-friendly web interface. Since its publication in Oct 2010, this web-resources has garnered >8,500 visits from researchers from more than 90 countries.

Research Interest

• Characterization of FAT10 in tumorigenesis and developing FAT10 as a target for inflammation-associated cancer.
• Characterization of HBV in HCC.
• Elucidate the role of HBX in deregulating miRNA and gene expression.
• Identify Biomarkers for HCC.
• Continual update of the pfSNP web-resource including the inclusion of new algorithm and resources.
• Identify SNP biomarkers for predicting population differential response to drugs.

Selected Publications

• Maulana Bachtiar, Brandon Nick Sern Ooi, Jingbo Wang, Jin Yu, Tin Wee Tan, Samuel S. Chong, and Caroline G. L. Lee*. (2019) Towards Precision Medicine: Interrogating the Human Genome to Identify Drug Pathways Associated with Potentially Functional, Population-Differentiated Polymorphisms. The Pharmacogenomics Journal.
• Lee Jin Lim, Samuel Y.S. Wong, Feiyang Huang, Sheng Lim, Samuel Chong, London Lucien Ooi, Oi Lian Kon and Caroline G. Lee*. Roles and Regulation of Long non-coding RNAs in Hepatocellular Carcinoma. Cancer Research DOI: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-19-0255 (2019).
• Lee Wai Yeow, Maulana Bachtiar, Chan Siew Choo, Cheryl and Caroline G Lee*. Comprehensive Review of Hepatitis B Virus-associated Hepatocellular Carcinoma Research through Text Mining and Big Data Analytics. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2019 Apr;94(2):353-367. doi: 10.1111/brv.12457. Epub 2018
• Cheryl CHAN, Thomas THURNHERR, Jingbo WANG, Xavier GALLART-PALAU, Siu Kwan SZE, Steve ROZEN and Caroline G. LEE. Global re-wiring of p53 transcription regulation by the hepatitis B virus X protein. Molecular Oncology 2016 10(8):1183-1195 (2016).
• Steven Setiawan Theng, Wei Wang, Way Champ Mah, Cheryl Chan, Jingli Zhuo, Yun Gao, Haina Qin, Liangzhong Lim, Samuel S. Chong, Jianxing Song and Caroline G.L. Lee*. Disruption of FAT10-MAD2 binding inhibits Tumor Progression Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 111(49):E5282-5291 (2014)