Date: 3 March 2023 (Friday)

Time: 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Venue: Cheung Kung Hai Lecture Theatre 2, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road

5:00 p.m.

Presenter: Ms. Huanwen WU, PhD candidate
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Stephanie MA
Presentation Title: A mouse liver tumor-derived organoid platform for understanding driver-dependent liver cancer and response to therapy
Abstract: Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) is a biologically complex and highly heterogeneous disease. As a result of this heterogeneity, the bulk tumor is comprised of a diverse collection of cells harboring distinct molecular signatures with different levels of sensitivity to treatment. To date, treatment for HCC has still followed a traditional “one-size-for-all” strategy where stratification of patients is only based on disease stage; and therapies are often inefficient or ineffective for many individuals. This magnitude of unmet clinical needs suggests that better pre-clinical and translational studies on novel HCC therapies are warranted. One of the key hurdles in working with clinical samples is the difficulty in distinguishing driver from passenger mutations, thus leading to our compromised understanding of pathway dependency of specific driver mutations. In this presentation, we describe the establishment and characterization, at various OMIC levels, distinct driver gene combinations induced murine HCC models and their corresponding 3D organoids. We show the models to recapitulate human HCC transcriptional subclass. Our current preliminary data also demonstrates utilization of this easily scalable murine HCC organoid platform to assess drug response heterogeneity with validation in human HCC patient-derived organoids.

5:30 p.m.

Presenter: Miss Yee Man AU-YEUNG (PhD candidate)
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Jiandong HUANG
Presentation Title: Engineering filamentous phage as a cancer treatment vaccine
Abstract: As a bacterial virus, many scientists have been trying to manipulate filamentous phages as a vector for cancer immunotherapy. Multiple teams have tried engineering neoantigen-displaying phages as cancer treatment vaccines, yet the effectiveness varies. To achieve optimal tumour-specific immunity, we designed a dendritic cell targeting M13 phage vaccine platform (SCP), which expresses spy-catchers on the p8 positions and DC targeting peptides on the p3 sites. In vitro experiments demonstrated that SCP can be effectively engulfed by dendritic cells and that spy-tagged proteins can easily attach to the phages by simple mixing. It was also shown in mice experiments that our phage vaccine could significantly repress MB49 tumour growth, and even lead to tumour regression. We hence propose that SCP can serve as a universal platform to carry personalised neoantigens for cancer immunotherapy.

ALL ARE WELCOME

Should you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact Miss Cynthia Cheung at 3917 9748.