School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Dr. Shiny Shengzhen Guo, Project Leader, Center of Protein Assemblies, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Talk Title: Functional diversity of KANK proteins in cancer

Date: 14 July 2025 (Monday)
Time: 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 3/4, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Zhongjun Zhou

Biography

Shiny spent 10 years in Shanghai, where she finished both the undergraduate studies and the PhD program at Chinese Academy of Sciences. Right after obtaining her PhD degree, she joined Professor Kathryn Cheah’s lab and started her first postdoc training in development, especially on mouse genetics. During that time, she had the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Reinhard Fässler at Max-Planck Institute in Munich Germany. Later Shiny was invited to join Professor Fässler’s group to take over the KANK project, and spent another two years as a postdoc. She was promoted as Project Leader since 2019 and led a small research group to study the role of KANK proteins in development and disease. Today, she is going to share her recent insights into the functional diversity of KANKs in cancer growth and metastasis.

Abstract

The Kidney Ankyrin Repeat-containing Proteins (KANK 1-4) are a novel family of focal adhesion (FA) proteins. Although all four KANKs share their localization to FAs, they are expressed in a cell type specific manner. We recently discovered that KANK1 promotes the growth of the primary tumor by compromising Scribble-mediated Hippo activation. KANK4, although exclusively expressed in α-smooth-muscle-actin (αSMA) positive cells in normal tissues, becomes de novo expressed in epithelial malignancies and promotes invadopodia formation, invasion and metastasis to distant organs. These findings expose an unexpected functional divergence of KANK1 and KANK4 for cancer progression. In my seminar, I will present my latest insights into the oncogenic and developmental functions of KANK proteins and outline my ongoing efforts to define their interactomes and signaling outputs.

All are welcome.