Furong Huang PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Qianben Wang, has been awarded the Department of Defense (DoD) Prostate Cancer Research Program’s 2021 Early Investigator Research Award.
This two-year research award is dedicated to supporting young scientists in the early stages of their careers, and allows them to develop a research project and further their intellectual development as prostate cancer researchers of the future. Dr. Huang’s funded proposal is entitled “Targeting the Oncogenomic Function of the E2F8 Transcription Factor in Lethal Prostate Cancer”. Furong’s project will use cutting-edge genomic technologies to discover how E2F8, an oncogenic transcription factor, enables lethal prostate cancer cell growth and invasion, and to develop a novel CRISPR/Cas13 RNA editing system-based nanoparticle therapy to block E2F8. The successful completion of this research will provide an experimental basis for future clinical trials testing the utility of this Cas13-based nanotherapy to target the traditionally-undruggable transcription factor E2F8 in lethal prostate cancer patients.