School of Biomedical Sciences is pleased to invite you to join the following seminar:

Date: 6 April 2023 (Thursday)
Time: 4:00 – 5:00 pm
Venue: Seminar Room 3, G/F, Laboratory Block, 21 Sassoon Road

Speaker: Professor Leonard Lipovich, Professor of Basic Medical Sciences, Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences (MBRU)
Talk Title: From the RNA world to the post-genomic era: Primate-specific long non-coding RNA genes as contributors and targets in human cancer, diabetes, and beyond
 

Biography

Leonard Lipovich, a pioneer in long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) biology of human disease, earned his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle. He completed postdoctoral training at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where he discovered the first mammalian lncRNA functional in stem cell pluripotency.

Subsequently, while on the faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, he was the first to empirically reveal unexpected ribosomal translation of short open reading frames from lncRNAs in human cells. In 2014, he received a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award for his work on how primate-specific lncRNAs, which are not conserved in mammalian evolution, contribute to human breast cancer etiology.

His current focus is on identifying, and validating in the laboratory, lncRNAs from genome-wide association studies and personalized genome sequencing as novel causes of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic disorders, and targeting them with personalized, RNAi-based therapeutics.

Abstract

Two decades ago, the Human Genome Project revealed that 98% of the human genome sequence was not protein-coding. Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) transcripts are now recognized as the prevalent class of mammalian ncRNAs. We demonstrated Miat, as a regulator and a target of Oct4, to be the first lncRNA functional in stem cell pluripotency. We subsequently characterized estrogen-induced oncogenic lncRNAs in estrogen receptor α positive breast cancer; their suppression points to new cancer treatments. Having discovered, using mass spectrometry within the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) Consortium in 2012, rare translation of short Open Reading Frames in specific lncRNAs, in 2022 we deployed ribosome profiling to show that transcriptional and translational regulation of these human estrogen-regulated lncRNAs are unexpectedly discordant. From Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) of type 2 diabetes, we manually annotated and mechanistically validated a direct disease-causal candidate, LOC157273. These, and most other, human lncRNAs, unlike protein-coding genes, lack evolutionary conservation beyond primates, but are functional in disease. They are targetable by RNAi-based drugs.

ALL ARE WELCOME

Should you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact Miss Angela Wong at 3917 9216.