Jun YU

  • Senior Research Fellowship in 2016 at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Professor Jun YU is a Professor at the Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, Director of the Research Laboratory of Institute of Digestive Disease, and Associate Director of State Key Laboratory of Digestive Disease, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Prof Yu obtained her MD and PhD at Tongji Medical University in 1994 and then she embarked on gastrointestinal specialist in Beijing University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Technical University of Dresden and University of Dresden and University of Magdeburg, Germany (under Professor Peter Malfertheiner) and CUHK (under Professor Joseph Sung), and worked as a Senior Research Officer at University of Sydney. She has been a CUHK faculty member since 2005. She is also the visiting or honorary professor of over 10 universities including Beijing University, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, CAS Guangzhou Institute of Advanced Technology, The Fourth Military Medical University, etc.

 

Over the years, Prof Yu has made new findings in the areas of gastrointestinal cancers in relation to the genomic and epigenomic molecular mechanisms, cancer biomarkers, cancer therapy, fatty liver disease and liver cancer.  She has discovered over 30 new genes that suppress gastric cancer, and revealing for the first time the genomic and epigenomic alterations in EBV-associated stomach cancer by integrated genome sequencing. All these discoveries are crucial to understanding the pathogenetic mechanisms of stomach cancer.  In recent years, the prevalence of colon cancer has increased greatly in Hong Kong.  Prof. Yu has discovered genes that facilitate and suppress colon cancer; discovered driver mutations for the implementation of personalized cancer therapy, the biclonal origin of colon cancer and survival associated mutation signature in colon cancer; the non-invasive diagnostic biomarkers for colon cancer; pioneered gut dysbiosis and stool-based bacteria marker of colon cancer in Chinese population. These findings open up a new class of molecular mechanisms and diagnosis for colon cancer pathogenesis.  Recently, Prof Yu has demonstrated some major discoveries in the pathogenetic mechanisms of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which will comprehensively depict the molecular landscape of NAFLS by using unbiased systems biology approaches, thereby finding out the potential preventative and curative treatments. 

 

Awards

Prof Yu’s contributions to the advancement of medical sciences have been recognized worldwide with many prestigious awards. She received the Research Excellence Award CUHK in 2010; First-class of the Ministry of Education (MOE) Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards (Natural science) in 2010; First-class of MOE Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards (Scientific and Technological Progress Award) 2012; National Award for Science and Technology Progress 2012; First-class of MOE Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards (Natural science) in 2014, Outstanding Fellow of the Faculty of Medicine, CUHK 2015; and Croucher Senior Research Fellowship for 2016-2017.

 

Editor for Journals

Associate editor or editorial board member for Oncogene, Scientific Reports, Life Science, World J Gastroenterol, etc.

 

Patents

Ganted 10 patents and filed 31 patents for cancer biomarkers in US, China and Taiwan

 

Publications

Prof Yu has published over 280 publications in international peer-reviewed journals. Among them, 51 papers with impact factor > 10 including Nature Biotechnology, Cancer Cell, Cell Metab, Gastroenterology, Gut, Hepatology, Cancer Cell, Nature Communication, Journal of Hepatology etc. She has edited 7 book or book chapters particularly in the areas of GI cancers and NASH.