Lixing Yang, PhD

The project aims to discover new oncogenic events in lung cancers in never smokers. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has launched Sherlock-lung Study to collect and perform multi-omics sequencing of 2000 lung cancers in never smokers. We collaborate with the NCI to analyze the genomic and transcriptomic sequencing data. Last September, the NCI has performed whole-genome sequencing on 1217 patients. We detected a total 182,990 somatic structural variants (SVs) and 102 fusion genes involving ALK, ROS1, RET and MET. COVID-19 has had significant negative impact on our research. During the pandemic, two postdocs have left the lab. We have had very hard time to recruit new postdocs since pharmaceutical and biotech industry have been expanding. As a result, I have to keep cutting down ongoing research projects to stay focused. Working remotely for a long period of time has caused significant mental stress to everyone. Although we are used to meet on zoom, the efficiency of communication is certainly not comparable to in-person communication. Overall, COVID-19 has cause a lot of damages to our research and damages are likely to continue at least for the near future.

Update: We have processed the whole-genome sequencing data of tumor-normal pairs from 1217 lung cancer patients, among whom 818 are never smokers. A total of 182,990 somatic structural variants were detected in these samples. We found a total of 12% of tumors harbor oncogenic fusions involving ALK, ROS1, RET or MET, which is much higher than in smokers.