This interview is with Biomarkers in Cancer editorial board member Dr Xiaofeng Zhou. Biomarkers in Cancer is an open access journal published by Libertas Academica.

Editor in Chief Dr Barbara Guinn has recently issued a call for papers.

What is the primary focus of your research?

The research in my lab is focused on molecular profiling of oral cancer. We are using oral cancer as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms of epithelial cell tumorigenesis. Oral cancer is an understudied disease. According to ACS Cancer Statistics 2004 to 2008, the new cases and death related to oral cancer increased 25% and 5% respectively, in the past 5 years, while new cases and death of cancer from all sites increased only about 5% and 0.3% respectively during the same period. This represents a major health problem.

My long term goal is to use system biology approaches to understand the initiation and progression of oral cancer, based on surveying large panels of clinical tissue samples and model systems (e.g., cell culture, animal model) that representing milestone events in disease progression (e.g., from precancer to cancer, from primary disease to metastatic disease). This will be achieved in 3 steps: 1) Multi-dimensional data collection at genomics at proteomics levels; 2) Biomarker discovery and molecular modeling of the disease process. Bioinformatic/statistic approaches have been developed to ensure integration of multi-dimensional datasets and modeling of molecular events in tumorigenesis of oral cancer; 3) Clinical and functional validation of the biomarkers and biological models.

What are the most exciting developments arising from current research in your area?

One of our recent research focuses is on microRNAs. It has been realized that microRNAs are widely involved in initiation and progression of cancer. MicroRNAs are sequence specific regulators of posttranscriptional gene expression. This fits very well with our overall research portfolio: multi-dimensional data collection and concurrent data analysis at multiple biological levels. We have been experimenting with various high throughput microRNA profiling platforms, and was able to generate some exciting and clinically relevant outcomes. Our preliminary results led to the identification several microRNA candidates (miR-138 and miR-222) that are relevant to the tumorigenesis of oral cancer (published in Cancer Lett and Cancer Genomics and Proteomics this year). We also received our first microRNA grant this year, which will support our development in this promising area.

Who are your main collaborators? Please describe your work with them.

The multi-disciplinary nature of our research projects requires expertise from several different fields. Just to name a few, I have been collaborating with Dr David Crowe and Joel Schwartz at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in molecular pathology and cancer biology. I have been collaborating with Dr David Wong (UCLA) and Dr Andre Kajdacsy-Balla (UIC) in term of clinical and translational research. I have been collaborating with Chen Li (Harvard), Steve Cole (UCLA) and Tianwei Yu (Emory) in the areas of data analysis and statistical modeling.

A major objective of my research is to improve the clinical management of the oral cancer patients. To facilitate the eventual translation of my research findings, I am continuously building clinical collaborations in the US and abroad (China and Italy). I am also holding a joined appointment (Visiting Professor) and have an active research project at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, where oral cancer is a major health problem. I am planning to perform discovery phase of the study based on US population and then validate my findings in China and Italy populations, which is an ideal approach for genetic studies: discovery in one population and validate in independent populations with similar etiologies.

How did you come to be working in your research area?

My mother is a chemist. I was kind of growing up in a laboratory. I was pretty sure I wanted to be a scientist when I was very young. However it took a while for me to finally settle into my current research area. My first research position was in biophysics, focused on the biophysical properties of muscle proteins. After this first real exposure to research, I then pursued a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. Following my Ph.D. training, I was fortunate to have a post-doc training in 2 different, yet interconnected areas, namely genomics and bioinformatics. I also earned a M.S. degree in Software Engineer.

With all these exposures to various exciting, but fairly diverse research fields, it is somewhat difficult to choose a focus area to pursue as a career. Eventually, at the end of my post-doc training, I came to the realization that I want to have a multi-disciplinary research project focus on one of the under-studied and under-treated diseases. Oral cancer is one of those diseases.

What do you think about the development of open access publishing? Have you published in an open access journal? What motivated you to do so?

I believe that open access publishing is very important. It facilitates the exchange of research data and scientific progress. For scientists, it definitely improves the visibility of your works. I believe this is one of the most important motivation for publishing in open access journals. We have recently published a number of articles in open access journals, including:

T. Yu, H. Ye, W. Sun, KC. Li, Z. Chen, S. Jacobs, DK. Bailey, DT. Wong, X. Zhou. A forward-backward fragment assembling algorithm for the identification of amplification and deletion breakpoints using high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array. BMC Bioinformatics (2007) 8:145.

X. Zhou, J. Cui, V. Macias, A. Kajdacsy-Balla, H. Ye, J. Wang, P.N. Rao. The progress on genetic analysis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Comp Funct Genomics (2007) Article ID 57513, 1-13.

H. Ye, T. Yu, S. Temam, B.L. Ziober, J. Wang, J.L. Schwartz, L. Mao, D.T. Wong, X. Zhou. Transcriptomic dissection of tongue squamous cell carcinoma. BMC Genomics (2008) 9:69.

X. Liu, Z. Chen, J. Yu, J. Xia, X. Zhou. MicroRNA profiling and head and neck cancer. Comp Funct Genomics (2009) vol. 2009, Article ID 837514, 11 pages. doi:10.1155/2009/837514 A.

Wang, X. Liu, S. Sheng, H. Ye, T. Peng, F. Shi, D.L. Crowe, X. Zhou. Dysregulation of heat shock protein 27 expression in tongue squamous cell carcinoma. BMC Cancer (2009) 9(1):167.

Further Information

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