Date: 14 May 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Venue: Mrs Chen Yang Foo Oi Telemedicine Centre, 2/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Rio Sugimura

Yi Bao, Ph.D. is a precision and translational oncology researcher and currently serves as a Research Investigator (research-track faculty) at the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology, University of Michigan. His research focuses on defining tumor-intrinsic mechanisms of immune evasion and therapeutic resistance, and on translating these insights into biomarker-driven, mechanism-guided strategies to improve cancer therapy, particularly immunotherapy. Dr. Bao has made important contributions to cancer immunology and precision oncology through a series of first-author studies published in leading journals, including Cancer Discovery, Journal of Clinical Investigation, PNAS, Gut, and Nature Communications. His work has identified several therapeutically actionable pathways that shape antitumor immunity, including the UBA1-STUB1 axis, CDK12/13-mediated STING activation, PIKfyve-regulated antigen presentation, and YTHDF1-driven immune suppression. Collectively, these studies have uncovered novel mechanisms of tumor immune escape and provided a strong foundation for the development of rational cancer immunotherapy combinations. His research integrates functional genomics, CRISPR-Cas9 screening, single-cell and bulk transcriptomics, high-parameter flow cytometry, and preclinical tumor modeling in syngeneic systems. Dr. Bao currently leads projects focused on next-generation UBA1 inhibitor development, mechanism-informed UBA1-based immunotherapy combinations, STING innate immune signaling, and strategies to enhance CAR-T cell therapy efficacy. In addition to his research accomplishments, Dr. Bao has demonstrated translational impact through contributing to intellectual property, including patent applications related to PIKfyve-based immunotherapy combinations and a novel UBA1 inhibitor. He is also committed to mentorship and team science, having supervised postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers who have gone on to careers in academia and industry. He has served as an invited reviewer for journals including Gut, PNAS, and Oncogene.

Advanced cancers remain a leading cause of death. Although immunotherapies such as immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) have transformed outcomes in several malignancies, many patients remain resistant, largely because of a profoundly immune-cold tumor microenvironment. My research program focuses on defining tumor-intrinsic mechanisms that drive immune evasion and resistance to immunotherapy, and on leveraging these insights to develop biomarker-driven, mechanism-guided immuno-oncology strategies. I discovered that the m6A reader YTHDF1 promotes immune evasion in colorectal cancer. More recently, I identified ubiquitin-like modifier-activating enzyme 1 (UBA1) as a key regulator of tumor immune escape and a promising therapeutic target. I also demonstrated that PIKFYVE inhibition enhances tumor-specific MHC class I expression to improve immunotherapy efficacy, and that CDK12/13 inhibition activates STING-mediated antitumor immunity through induction of R-loop formation. Based on this foundation, I hypothesize that tumor-intrinsic stress and epigenetic pathways play central roles in shaping the immune microenvironment in cancer, and that targeting these pathways will enhance antitumor immunity and improve response to immunotherapies. My ongoing work focuses on identifying dominant predictive biomarkers of response and key functional resistance nodes that constrain the efficacy of UBA1 inhibition, using unbiased functional genomics, drug-sensitivity profiling, and in vivo CRISPR screening. In parallel, I am investigating innate immune activation through the STING pathway as a broadly applicable therapeutic strategy for advanced cancers. In addition, leveraging the in vivo CRISPR screening platform that I have developed and optimized, I have initiated focused screens using an immunotherapy-relevant library to interrogate multiple promising treatment modalities, including CAR T-cell therapy and ICB, across diverse immunocompetent tumor models. Collectively, these efforts aim to establish new therapeutic paradigms for cancers that currently lack effective treatment options.

All are welcome.