The dysregulated expression of critical genes is one of the driving forces that transforms a normal cell into a cancer cell. In addition to genomic alterations, aberrant changes in post-transcriptional regulation by factors including non-coding RNAs and RNA binding proteins represent another mechanism to modify gene function and thus contribute to tumorigenesis.

The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has led to the identification of thousands of non-coding RNAs, only a handful of which have been functionally characterized. In addition to studying non-coding RNAs in their own right, our group is also interested in studying the non-coding regions of protein-coding mRNAs (untranslated regions, UTRs). As many mRNA populations comprise transcripts with different UTRs, and these UTRs control key processes such as stability, localization and transport, a better understanding of their function may lead to insights into the regulation of key cancer genes.

Our work has three main focus areas: (1) Deconvoluting RNA:RNA networks in cancer and understanding how they contribute to carcinogenesis; (2) Understanding the interplay between RNA:RNA interactions and RNA:protein interactions and (3) Examining potential crosstalk between these post-transcriptional networks and RNA processing pathways such as splicing and editing. Our long-term goal is to translate our basic research discoveries into the clinic, we anticipate that our work will open new avenues for the development of novel RNA-based anti-cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.