Principal Investigator: Eun Hyun Ahn, MS, PhD
Education and Postdoctoral Training
She worked as Postdoctoral Researcher in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University and in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She received both her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Michigan State University with Double Majors in Biochemical Nutrition and Environmental Toxicology. She received her B.S. (with the 2nd highest GPA at the departmental level) from Chung-Ang University (Seoul, South Korea).
Faculty Position
Dr. Ahn currently works as an Instructor, Primary Faculty Member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she worked as Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology, School of Medicine at the University of Washington (UW). Before she came to UW, she worked at Rexahn Pharmaceutical company (Rockville, MD, USA) for a year and worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of Food and Nutrition at Chung-Ang University (CAU) for two years. While she was at CAU, she conducted research as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine during Summer and Winter quarters.
Research Background
Dr. Ahn has expertise in the areas of molecular biology, biochemical nutritional toxicology, and bioinformatics, with extensive training on genome-wide profiling of mutations and gene expressions, and cell signaling pathways in cancer and stem cells. Her prior research interests were centered on the mechanisms of anticancer agents in breast and colon cancers and the identification and characterization of novel therapeutic targets in alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (ARMS). She demonstrated that sphingolipid metabolites exerted their chemotherapeutic and chemopreventive effects by inducing apoptosis and by regulating AKT and MAPK pathways in colon and breast cancer cells. She found that the loss of anti-proliferative effects of retinoic acid in breast carcinogenesis is due to the overexpression of p185c-erbB2/neu. Her research resulted in the discovery that the differential anti-proliferative effects of retinoic acid receptor (RAR)-α,β,γ isoforms are mediated via the regulation of p27kip, a cyclin dependent kinase. She identified the target genes of a fusion oncoprotein (PAX3-FOXO1) in ARMS using gene expression profiling and developed various genetically engineered cells to characterize the functions of the novel target genes.
In recent years, she has investigated genomic changes in breast cancer stem cells, normal stem cells, and glioblastoma using a cutting-edge deep sequencing technology termed Duplex Sequencing (DS), which exhibits the lowest error rate (<5x10-8) among currently available DNA sequencing methods (eg., next generation sequencing error rate 10-2 to 10-3). Using Duplex Sequencing, she revealed the decreased mitochondrial mutagenesis and mutation signature changes during the transformation of normal stem cells to cancer stem cells (CSCs) and found many novel variants. She has also studied the regulation of cell function by microenvironments such as extracellular matrix (ECM)-mimetic nanotopography. She explored the effects of nanotopography-induced cellular stiffness and rigidity on cell fate decision of human mesenchymal stem cells and cardiac stem cells. She examined the physical transfer of cytoplasmic proteins between heterotypic cell types in metastatic melanoma and endothelial cell models. She investigated migration abilities of breast CSCs cultured on the ECM-mimetic nanotopographic platforms. The ultimate goals of her current and future research projects are to identify biomarkers for the early detection of therapy resistance and tumor recurrence using cutting-edge deep sequencing and ECM-biomimetic technologies, and to develop a novel strategy for preclinical screening of anti-migratory chemotherapeutic agents.