Dr. Zhenyu Jia from University of Akron Visited IHB on July 14.

Dr. Zhenyu Jia, a united Assistant Professor of University of Akron, Northeast Ohio Medical University and University of California, Irvine, paid a visit to Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHB) on July 14. During his visit, he gave an oral presentation with the title of “Tumor Microenvironment and Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer” for IHB researchers and graduate students.

In his presentation, Dr. Jia introduced his research on the tumor microenvironment using data filtering, statistical modeling and other bioinformatics approaches. After the profound and interesting presentation, Dr. Jia had extensive discussions with the attendees. 

Prostate cancer is a common malignancy, mostly diagnosed by prostate biopsy procedures. However, even the best current methods, including transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) procedures, may miss up to 30% of prostate cancers significant clinically. Dr. Jia has identified gene expression changes in stroma that can detect tumor nearby. He compared gene expression profiles of biopsies containing stroma near tumor and biopsies from volunteers without prostate cancer. About 3,800 significant expression changes were found and filtered thereafter using independent expression profiles to eliminate genes possibly related to age or expressed at detectable levels in tumor cells. A stroma-specific classifier for nearby tumor was constructed on the basis of 114 candidate genesand tested on 364 independent samples.  

These results indicate that the prostate cancer microenvironment exhibits changes useful for categorizing the presence of tumor in patients when a prostate sample is derived from near the tumor and does not contain any recognizable tumor. This research was completed in collaboration with Dr. XIA Xiaoqin (IHB), and was published on Cancer Research with the title “Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer Using Differentially Expressed Genes in Stroma”. Now, this work has been cited widely by other researchers.