Shou Jiang Gao, PhD

The Gao lab is part of the Cancer Virology Program (CVP) in the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. The lab primarily studies the mechanism of infection and oncogenesis of cancer viruses. The student will be exposed to molecular virology, cancer biology, cancer metabolism, epigenetics, epitranscriptomics, interactions of cancer cells with tumor microenvironment and immune cells, inflammation, microbiome and cancer therapy. The lab closely collaborates with computational biologists, particularly Dr Yufei Huang, who is also in CVP, allowing the development of novel systems approaches for dissecting complex biological questions, including the recent development of novel analytic tools for spatially-resolved single cell transcriptomics. Recent works have identified novel tumor suppressive functions of an arginine sensor CASTOR1, which regulates both tumor and immune cells. Ongoing works are examining the functions of CASTOR1 in other types of cancer including lung cancer and HPV-associated head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, and innate and adaptive immunity in models of colitis and colon cancer.