Education
- B.S., Pharmacy, Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN
- Ph.D., Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of California, San Francisco, CA
- Post-Doc, PRAT Fellow, National Institutes of Health, NCI, Bethesda, MD
Research Interests
- Novel gene therapies for cancer treatment
- Protein/peptide-based therapeutics for cancer
The Lim Lab creates and develops novel cancer therapies through innovative pharmaceutical research using genetic engineering, biochemistry, molecular targeting, and in vitro/in vivo disease models. Applying these techniques, coupled with the latest drug delivery strategies, we aim to generate clinically relevant therapeutics that will ultimately save patient lives.
Our lab develops novel therapies for cancer treatment in collaboration with clinicians at the HCI. Current targets involve proteins involved in cancer (tumor suppressors or oncogenes). We focus on understanding the molecular mechanisms of signal transduction pathways in cancer and use peptides or genes as novel therapeutics to disrupt oncogenesis or induce apoptosis. Our current projects include development of therapeutics for cancers that are “untreatable” or those that exhibit drug resistance. We have developed a p53-Bad gene therapy construct that combines the power of p53 tumor suppressor with apoptotic Bad (Molecular Pharmaceutics, 2019, 16(8):3386-98). We are currently testing this also in hepatocellular carcinoma, the third most common cause of cancer death globally. We also are testing a peptide-based coiled-coil therapeutic for treatment of CML, or chronic myeloid leukemia (Leukemia, 2015, 29(8):1668-75; J Phys Chem B. 2018, Apr 12;122(14):3864-3875) that is primed for clinical translation. Certain point mutations in CML render standard tyrosine kinase inhibitors ineffective; our coiled-coil inhibitors circumvent the drug resistance problem