Qi Liu

Qi Liu
Postdoctoral research scholar
niversity of IOWA, Iowa City, IA, USA

Biography

From undergraduate to graduate period, Qi Liu focused on identifying imprinted genes and exploring their expression pattern during embryonic development. During my graduate study, she had been actively engaged in several research fields: preclinical translational medicine on cancers; epigenetic mechanisms of microRNA and DNA methylation; and cell & molecular biology and developmental biology. Her doctoral dissertation topic was about the expression of microRNAs and their regulation during mouse embryonic development from the stage of fertilization to birth, and the approaches involved knock-out transgenic mouse models. This project gave me extensive experience with techniques of animal breeding of transgenic mice and embryonic dissection and the results were published on FEBS letters. Moreover, a study on preclinical research of bladder and kidney cancer collaborated with Shanghai Cancer Institute Hospital, Anhui Medical University, Harbin Medical Hospital and UCLA on cancer chemotherapy provided me with well-knit professional basic knowledge in cancer research. In this project, she described a pipeline for rapid discovery of optimal drug regimen in eight cancer cell lines using a combination of machine based differential evolution paradigm and experimental testing through several reiterations. The results proved a robust method to optimize chemotherapy with a very significant therapeutic impact that might be a paradigm shift in this extremely important area for clinical development of effective therapeutics against cancer. This study was published in Scientific Reports in 2015. Additionally, utilizing DNA methylation study and microRNA array, she identified miR-193a as a very important regulator during the development of multi-drug resistance of bladder cancer by targeting LOXL4, PSEN1, SRSF2/PLAU/HIC2, HOXC9 and ING5 gene. Five papers were published on journals: Oncotarget, BBA Molecular Basis of Disease, Cell death & disease, Mol Cancer and Cancer letters in 2014 and 2015. In my postdoctoral training at University of Iowa, I have been studying the role of PHF8 in HER2 driven breast cancer development and resistance to anti-HER2 therapy. And now she is preparing at least 2 manuscripts to submit from now to the mid of 2017. In addition, she have helped PHF8 related projects in the lab to study the epigenetic regulations in neuroendocrine differentiation (NED) and castration resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), and revealed a unique expression pattern and functions of PHF8 and KDM3A in prostate cancer development. Paper was accepted byOncotarget (2016). Another PHF8 study revealing the novel c-MYC-miR-22-PHF8 regulatory axis and the role of PHF8 in breast cancer development is under second review by Nucleic Acids Research. In summary, she is an active, highly promoted and productive researcher in the area of the proposed study, and her expertise, experience would definitely benefit for the proposed study.