Yik Ling Bowie Cheng 鄭翊翎

  • Butterfield Croucher Studentship in 2017 at University of Hong Kong

Dr. Yik Ling Bowie, CHENG completed her Ph.D. program in the Department of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), under the supervision of Prof. Yu-Hung Anskar, LEUNG. She has also received MPhil and MSc research training from Prof. Oi-Lin Irene, NG’s lab at HKU, and Prof. Stephen, WILSON’s lab at University College London (UCL) respectively. During her graduate study, she demonstrated that IRAK1 augments cancer stemness and drug resistance in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and identified AKR1B10 as a novel downstream target of IRAK1. The study was published in the journal Cancer Research, and the thesis was awarded the Li Ka Shing Best Thesis Prize. In her Ph.D., she established a novel zebrafish platform that enables efficient evaluation of the prognostic impact and drug response based on the mutational profiles of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients. In brief, zebrafish with specific mutational profiles were achieved through transient expression via microinjection and the creation of stable transgenic zebrafish lines through Tol2 transgenesis. This study demonstrated differential leukemic phenotype and drug response in accordance with the mutation combinations, helping to pave the way for personalized medicine. This project was supported by Croucher Foundation Research Studentship and Butterfield-Croucher Studentship. 

Currently

Currently, Bowie is joining Dr. Taia T, WANG’s team at Stanford University to investigate the role of antibodies and their Fc modifications in COVID-19 disease severity and in anti-tumor immunity. Dr. WANG’s team is particularly experienced in using a range of in vivo and in vitro systems to study how antibodies can modulate viral infection or anti-viral responses through signaling with FcgRs.