9^th World Biomarkers Congress

Jianhua Luo has been studying molecular mechanism related to human malignancies in the last 24 years. Currently, he is a Professor of Pathology and Director of High Throughput Genome Center at University of Pittsburgh. In the last 16 years, he has been largely focusing on genetic and molecular mechanism of human prostate cancer and hepatocellular carcinomas. He has characterized several signaling pathways that play critical role in prostate cancer development. He proposed prostate cancer field effect in 2002 and he is one of the pioneers in utilizing high throughput gene expression and genome analyses to analyze fi eld effects in prostate cancer and liver cancer. He is also the fi rst in using methylation array and whole genome methylation sequencing to analyze prostate cancer. Recently, his group found that patterns of copy number variants of certain specific genome loci are predictive of prostate cancer clinical outcomes, regardless tissue origin. His discovery of several novel fusion transcripts and their association with aggressive prostate cancer has brought signifi cant new insight into the fi eld of prostate cancer research. Overall, these findings advance our understanding on how cancer develops and behaves and lay down the foundation for better future diagnosis and treatment of human malignancies