The International Union Against Cancer (UICC) has awarded Dr Yap Lee Fah an American Cancer Society Beginning Investigators Fellowship (ACSBI) funded by the American Cancer Society. This is a highly prestigious international award, with only four fellowships being awarded worldwide in 2010.  This fellowship is only available for individuals who possess a doctorate degree in the early stages of their independent investigator career and no longer under research mentoring and with an explicit commitment to return to the home institute. The specific goals of this fellowship include increased research capacity and reduced burden of cancer in own country. Dr Yap will be working in the laboratory of Professor Paul Murray at the Cancer Research UK Institute for Cancer Studies at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom for 1 year.

 

Dr Yap Lee Fah has been awarded with an International YSF Fellowship for the OzBio2010 Conference in Melbourne, Australia (23 Sept – 1 Oct). Dr Yap will participate in the Young Scientist Forum Program, and also present some of our results at the subsequent OzBio2010 Conference.

 

In collaboration with the Malaysian Genome Institute and through a grant provided by the Malaysian Ministry of Science Human Resource Development Grant, the Oral Cancer and Nasopharyngeal Cancer Research Teams at CARIF jointly organized a workshop entitled “Molecular Tools in Biomarker Development: Distinguishing Drivers from Noise” from 3 to 7 May 2010. The workshop enabled local researchers to perform experiments to study the function of specific genes and included knock-in and knock-out experiments, imaging, proliferation assays, invasion assays and migration assays. The teaching faculty for this workshop were Dr. Vyomesh Patel (NIH, USA), Dr. Vivek Tanavde (Bioinformatics Institute Singapore), Dr. Norfilza Mohd Mokhtar (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia), Prof. Dr. Cheong Sok Ching and Dr. Yap Lee Fah (CARIF).

 

Together with Universiti Putra Malaysia, CARIF organized the first Malaysian NPC Research Day on 17^thMay. Key NPC researchers and clinicians across the country attended this meeting and exchanged scientific and clinical ideas. A potential national collaborative project was identified and a collective effort will be made to explore future funding opportunities.

 

CARIF collaborators at Universiti Sains Malaysia show that the human papilloma virus is associated with oral squamous cell carcinomas in Malaysia.   This paper shows that high risk HPV is associated with oral cancer and maybe one of the contributing factors in the initiation of oral cancer.

 

May 2009 Dr Yap Lee Fah was awarded the 3rd prize for oral presentation at the 3rd Regional Conference on Molecular Medicine held in Kota Kinabalu Sabah. Dr Yap presented the results of a collaborative effort by CARIF and the University of Bristol to identify a novel tumour suppressor gene that is involved in head and neck cancers.

Dr Teo Soo Hwang and Dr Yap Lee Fah are featured in articles highlighting nasopharyngeal cancer in Sin Chew Jit Poh and Medical tribune. In this article, we describe our work on the first genome-wide (>15,000 genes) study of Malaysian NPC and the identification of a tumour suppressor gene which may have implications for the treatment response of NPC patients.

The Group Leader for the Nasopharyngeal Cancer Research Team, Dr Yap Lee Fah published her PhD work in Oncogene (Impact Factor: 7.13). This work is a collaborative effort between CARIF, the University of Bristol, and Bart’s and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, United Kingdom. In this paper, Dr Lee describes the identification of a novel oncogene in oral cancer and its functional role in the pathogenesis of oral cancer.

Together with our collaborators in University Malaya and Tung Shin Hospital, the Nasopharyngeal Cancer Research team published a paper in the Journal of Human Genetics. This paper describes the first genome-wide association study of nasopharyngeal cancer in Malaysia.

March 2009 The CARIF Nasopharyngeal Cancer team, together with the Malaysian office at British High Commission [Science and Innovation Division], jointly organized a symposium entitled “The Tale of 2 Asian Cancers: new insights of Oral and Nasopharyngeal Cancers”. The event brought Professor Paul Murray from the University of Birmingham and Dr Ian Paterson from the University of Bristol, which was well-attended by approximately 100 delegates from Malaysia and Singapore.

January 2009 The NPC team’s work, in collaboration with Professor Paul Murray in the University of Birmingham and Dr Paul Lim at Tung Shin Hospital is published in Journal of Pathology [Impact Factor: 6.466]. The study shows through microarray gene expression analysis that the DNA repair protein ATM is downregulated by the Epstein Barr Virus in nasopharyngeal cancer and opens up a new line of understanding of the mechanism by which nasopharyngeal cancer develops. In addition, these observations are of particular interest because the loss of ATM may have implications for the treatment of NPC and opens up the possibility of ATM as a as a prognostic/predictive biomarker for NPC.   December 2008 CARIF researchers, in collaboration with the Principal Investigator, Dr Yap Yoke Yeow from University Putra Malaysia and co-Investigators at Kuala Lumpur General Hospital, Penang General Hospital, Hospital University Sains Malaysia, Sarawak General Hospital, University Sarawak (UniMAS), Hospital Likas and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, establish a collaboration with the Clinical Research Centre, Ministry of Health, BioLitec in Ireland & Malaysia, and Prof Bing I. Tan at The Netherlands Cancer Institute to conduct the investigator-led trial entitled “Phase II trial to determine the efficacy of Foscan Photodynamic Therapy versus Brachytherapy in the treatment of recurrent or residual nasopharyngeal cancer.   September 2008 Together with the Malaysian NPC Study Group, the Nasopharyngeal Cancer team published a paper in Medical Journal of Malaysia describing the establishment and early results of a multi-institutional study of nasopharyngeal cancer in Malaysia.   July 2008 Together with our collaborators at the Cancer Research UK Institute for Cancer Studies in Birmingham, United Kingdom, the Nasopharyngeal Cancer Team published a paper in the American Journal of Pathology (Impact Factor 5.9). This paper describes the contribution of EBNA1 to an EBV-driven malignancy, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.   November 2007 CARIF nasopharyngeal cancer team was given grant from the Malaysian Ministry of Health to establish the Malaysian NPC tissue bank. Together with the associated clinical outcome database led by Dr Pua Kin Choo at Penang General Hospital and Dr Alan Khoo at the Institute of Medical Research and involving scientists and clinicians at 6 Malaysian Hospitals, the NPC Tissue Bank was established to be a resource that will contribute to research for the development of better ways to beat NPC.   July 2007 CARIF nasopharyngeal cancer team was awarded a research grant from the Malaysian Ministry of Health to develop peptide vaccines for nasopharyngeal cancer. In this research programme, a shortlist of genes which were identified from gene expression analysis of nasopharyngeal cancer samples would be tested as potential targets for peptide vaccine therapy.   March 2007 CARIF’s second PhD Scholar (Dr Yap Lee Fah) completed her PhD programme and returned to CARIF as a Post-Doctoral Research Scientist in the Nasopharyngeal Cancer Research Team. Dr Yap’s PhD examined the molecular pathogenesis of oral cancer by identifying genes whose genetic and epigenetic changes contribute to the development of oral cancer.   September 2005 Ms Amyza and Ms Yap Lee Fah won the first and second prize for Best Poster in the Applied Science category at the 1st Regional Conference on Molecular Medicine.