Lixing Yang, PhD

The project aims to discover new oncogenic events in lung cancers in never smokers. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has launched Sherlock-lung Study to collect and perform multi-omics sequencing of 2000 lung cancers in never smokers. We collaborate with the NCI to analyze the genomic and transcriptomic sequencing data. Last September, the NCI has performed whole-genome sequencing on 1217 patients. We detected a total 182,990 somatic structural variants (SVs) and 102 fusion genes involving ALK, ROS1, RET and MET. COVID-19 has had significant negative impact on our research. 

Update: We have processed the whole-genome sequencing data of tumor-normal pairs from 1217 lung cancer patients, among whom 818 are never smokers. A total of 182,990 somatic structural variants were detected in these samples. We found a total of 12% of tumors harbor oncogenic fusions involving ALK, ROS1, RET or MET, which is much higher than in smokers.