Feng Yue, PhD
Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics; Feinberg School of Medicine
Research Program
- Cancer Epigenetics and Nuclear Dynamics (CEND)
- Translational Research in Malignancy (TRIM)
Cancer-Focused Research
The long-term goal of Dr. Yue's group is to use a combination of high throughput genomics, computational modeling, and functional assays to study how genetic variants contribute to the pathogenesis of human cancer. In particular, he is interested to identify the mutations that can disrupt the function of non-coding regulatory elements such as enhancers and further influence the 3D organization of the human genome. He has been actively involved with several large NIH-funded consortia, and lead the overall analysis effort for the mouse ENCODE consortium (Yue et al. Nature 2014). More recently, his group and their collaborators show that Hi-C can be used as tool for systematic discovery of SVs in the genome and also reported widespread neo-TADs and enhancer hijacking events, which potentially contribute to gene misregulation in cancer cells. The eventual goal for Dr. Yue's research is to reveal the key cancer-specific or subtype-specific regulators and pathways, which can be potentially used as cancer biomarkers and therapeutic targets.