AIMRC Seminar on Chronic Hepatitis B and HBV-Triggered Carcinogenesis Oct. 25

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Jian Cao of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey.

The Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center will host a seminar at 11:50 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 25, via Zoom. Jian Cao, assistant professor of medicine at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, will discuss his work on liver cancer in a presentation titled, "Hepatitis B virus integrations drive hepatocellular carcinoma through hijacking histone modification mechanism."

Liver cancer is among the most diagnosed and deadly cancer worldwide. Chronic infection of hepatitis B virus (HBV) is the single most important cause of hepatocellular carcinoma, the dominant subtype of liver cancer. However, the mechanism of HBV-triggered carcinogenesis is not fully understood, which leads to limited options for targeted therapies. We have found that about 10 percent of HBV-associated HCC tumors carry clonal HBV integrations in lysine methyltransferase 2B (KMT2B, also known as MLL4), leading to the expression of N-terminal truncations of KMT2B. Overexpression of an N-terminal truncation of KMT2B transforms hepatocytes in vitro and trigger tumor formation in vivo. Our study discovered a novel oncogenic mechanism of HCC.

Cao received his bachelor's degree in 2003 from an interdisciplinary program between China Pharmaceutical University and Nanjing University. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from Shang Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he studied cholesterol metabolism. In 2009, he moved to the U.S. and joined the Qin Yan lab at Yale Medical School as a postdoc to study cancer epigenetics, majorly in KDM5 family histone demethylases. In 2019, Cao started his own lab at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey studying several recurrent epigenetic events in different types of cancer, including dysregulation of histone methylation in hepatocellular carcinoma and loss of chromatin remodeling in melanoma.