We are delighted to announce that Jin Rui (Amos) Liang, who will open an independent research laboratory within the MRC PPU during the summer of 2022, has been awarded a highly sought after Career Development Fellowship from Cancer Research UK to study a novel association between endoplasmic reticulum-specific autophagy, or ERphagy activity and cancer progression. During his postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Jacob Corn initially at the University of California, Berkeley (2015-2018) and then in ETH Zurich (2018-present), Amos identified and characterised novel regulators of ERphagy, using several elegant CRISPR genome-wide screening approaches. One of these investigations points towards the regulation of ERphagy activity by several key oncogenes, suggesting a potential contribution of ERphagy during cancer. For his fellowship proposal, Amos aims to explore the fundamental mechanism in which ERphagy is regulated and how this could have an impact on cancer progression. The fellowship will provide Amos with £1.25M research funding over 5 years to tackle this project.

Amos commented “I am immensely grateful to the CRUK for seeing the potential in my work and in my ability as a new principal investigator to lead this highly exciting study. It is my hope that the work generated from this fellowship will have a positive impact on cancer diagnosis and therapies in the future.”

Dario Alessi Director of the MRC PPU stated “I am delighted for Amos to receive this important CRUK Fellowship that provides generous support to explore how the ERphagy network is linked to cancer. This is a hugely exciting project that has strong potential to unravel fundamental knowledge and result in new strategies to better treat and diagnose cancer in the future.”