UF Health Cancer Center member Rui Yin, Ph.D., has received a grant from the Elsa U. Pardee Foundation to develop leading-edge artificial intelligence technologies to identify microRNA (miRNA) interactions in colorectal cancer.
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide. It’s expected to cause about 52,900 deaths this year in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society.
Dysregulation of specific miRNA levels is associated with cancer diagnosis and can predict tumor severity. That’s why further studying the role of miRNAs in cancer development and tumor malignancy is clinically relevant.
With the new grant, titled “Deciphering Dysregulated RNA Interference in Colorectal Cancer via Semantic Embedded Graph Neural Networks,” Yin’s team aims to understand how cancer-associated miRNAs are regulated and identify their specific targets.
Yin is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics in the UF College of Medicine whose research focuses on applying and developing machine learning approaches and protein language models to address biomedical problems.
He is collaborating on the project with Mingyi Xie, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology who has led several recent seminal studies on RNA modifications. Both Yin and Xie are members of the UF Health Cancer Center’s Mechanisms of Oncogenesis research program.
The Elsa U. Pardee Foundation was established in 1944 under the terms of the will of Elsa U. Pardee, who died of cancer. Elsa U. Pardee Foundation grants are devoted to cancer research, with about $110.5 million given to over 300 different institutions across the United States since then.
