• Characterized the genetic and epigenetic signatures of diabetic retinopathy (DR) in the peripheral blood samples of Saudi Arabian population to identify potential biomarkers for proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR)• Investigated the epigenetic regulatory mechanism of the Keap1-Nrf2 antioxidant signaling pathway and its pathogenic role on age-related macular degeneration (AMD)• Studied the genetic and epigenetic landscape variations during normal retinal cell development, which would provide the essential information for developing innovative cell-based therapies to treat optic neuropathies • Discovered significant 5hmC profile shift during the artificially induced cell differentiation of engineered human pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) into retinal ganglion cells (RGCs)

• Investigated the causes and the consequences of global DNA hypomethylation (GDHO), a cancer hallmark, in human epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC), and discovered that in EOC tumors with GDHO, long-range regional DNA methylation loss conservatively occurred on specific chromatin locations, which overlapped with the late-replicated nuclear lamina-associated domains (LADs), suggesting the passive DNA methylation loss mechanism due to abnormally accelerated cell proliferation as the main caused of GDHO• Analyzed the DNA methylomes of normal ovary tissue (NO), normal ovarian surface epithelia (OSE), normal fallopian tube epithelia (FTE), and the early stage EOC tumors. Found that early stage EOC was significantly more similar to FET than OSE, which provided the first epigenetic evidence to address the scientific debate on the tissue origin of epithelial ovarian cancer• Investigated the epigenetic regulation mechanism and the oncogenic function of several cancer-testis antigen (CTA) genes (CT45, PRAME, POTEs et al.), and confirmed their clinical potentials as prognostic and/or therapeutic biomarkers of human ovarian cancer

• Participated in the decisive preclinical research for NY-ESO-1 clinical trial, discovered that decitabine treatment could dramatically induce the expression of multiple tumor antigen genes, including NY-ESO-1, by inhibiting their promoter DNA methylation, thus confirmed the possibility of combining the epigenetic therapy (decitabine treatment) with the immunotherapy (NY-ESO-1 vaccine) as a novel therapy strategy for patients with relapsed ovarian cancer• Performed thorough genome-wide gene expression and DNA methylation analyses of a large number of EOC tumors and normal controls, to studied the molecular pathology of human ovarian cancer, and identified genetic and epigenetic biomarkers for different subtypes of EOC• Studied CTA gene expression in EOC, and found that most CTA genes were expressed in at least a portion of the examined EOCs, and each EOC tumor at least abnormally expressed one CTA gene, suggesting a combined therapeutic approach targeting multiple CTAs at the same time would help overcoming the heterogeneity of tumor cells• Designed, budgeted, and proposed the research project of CT45 gene family functional study, and won the research funding from the Mark Diamond Research Fund of SUNY at Buffalo

• Participated in developing anti-tumor DNA vaccines against breast cancer • Successfully constructed the recombinant plasmid expression MUC1 and GM-CSF genes