Rate My Professor Xinyuan Guan

Xin-Yuan Guan is the Chair Professor and Sophie Y M Chan Professor in Cancer Research in the Department of Clinical Oncology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong. He earned his PhD from the University of Arizona in 1993 and was subsequently recruited to the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, where he conducted research in cancer genomics. He joined the University of Hong Kong, was promoted to Professor in 2007 and Chair Professor in 2018, and currently serves as Director of the Laboratory of Cancer Genetics.

Professor Guan's research centers on the investigation of the tumor microenvironment, identification and characterization of cancer stem cells, and metastatic initiation cells in nasopharyngeal carcinoma, esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, and hepatocellular carcinoma. His laboratory has published extensively in high-impact journals, including miR-130b promoting CD133+ liver tumor-initiating cell growth and self-renewal via tumor protein 53-induced nuclear protein 1 (Cell Stem Cell, 2010), SPOCK1 regulated by CHD1L blocking apoptosis and promoting HCC cell invasiveness and metastasis (Gastroenterology, 2013), recoding RNA editing of AZIN1 predisposing to hepatocellular carcinoma (Nature Medicine, 2013), down-regulation of tumor suppressor ATOH8 increasing cancer stemness in hepatocellular carcinoma (Gastroenterology, 2015), comprehensive single-cell sequencing revealing stromal dynamics in nasopharyngeal carcinoma microenvironment (Nature Communications, 2021), and RALYL increasing hepatocellular carcinoma stemness by sustaining TGF-β2 mRNA stability (Nature Communications, 2021). Earlier contributions include identification of tumorigenic liver cancer stem/progenitor cells (Gastroenterology, 2007) and AIB1 as a steroid receptor coactivator amplified in breast and ovarian cancer (Science, 1997). He received the 2011 Faculty Outstanding Research Output Award from the University of Hong Kong. His work has profoundly influenced the understanding of cancer progression mechanisms and therapeutic targets in oncology.