Associate Professor Tao Liu

Tao Liu leads the Gene Dysregulation Group at Children’s Cancer Institute and is a conjoint Associate Professor in the UNSW Faculty of Medicine.

Associate Professor Liu and his team have recently developed a new pipeline to identify neuroblastoma drivers and their inhibitors. This pipeline integrates RNA-sequencing data from the neuroblastoma tissues of 493 patients with genome-wide survival analyses of every gene. The result is a short list of overexpressed transcripts that are significantly and independently correlated with poor prognosis.

Notably, Associate Professor Liu has already discovered that an RNA methyltransferase known as BUD23 is one of the top transcripts highly expressed in neuroblastomas and independently associated with poor patient outcomes. 

In this project, Associate Professor Liu and his team aim to demonstrate the oncogenic role of the RNA methyltransferase in neuroblastoma, develop its inhibitors, and showcase the significant anticancer effects of these inhibitors, paving the way for their potential translation into safer and more effective treatments for neuroblastoma.

AP Liu is also a previous grant recipient for earlier stages of this research, which was proven to have made significant progress.  

Read more about the project here. 

Find out more about AP Liu.