Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies prioritise drug discovery for the larger adult cancer market, with limited interest in childhood cancer. Associate Professor Liu – one of our 2025–2026 grant recipients – wants to change this.
Tao Liu lead the Gene Dysregulation Group at Children’s Cancer Institute and was a conjoint Associate Professor in the UNSW Faculty of Medicine and is now conducting research in China.
Associate Professor Liu and his team developed a new pipeline to identify neuroblastoma drivers and their inhibitors. The pipeline integrated RNA-sequencing data from the neuroblastoma tissues of 493 patients with genome-wide survival analyses of every gene. The result was a short list of overexpressed transcripts that are significantly and independently correlated with poor prognosis.
Notably, Associate Professor Liu discovered that an RNA methyltransferase known as BUD23 is one of the top transcripts highly expressed in neuroblastomas and independently associated with poor patient outcomes.
In this specific project, Associate Professor Liu and his team demonstrated the oncogenic role of the RNA methyltransferase in neuroblastoma, how it developed inhibitors and showcased the significant anticancer effects of these inhibitors, paving the way for their potential translation into safer and more effective treatments for neuroblastoma.
AP Liu is also a previous grant recipient for earlier stages of this research, which was proven to have made significant progress.
Read more about the project here.
