Dr Sung Gong

Currently I am working on three liquid biopsy projects with different omics dataset from maternal plasma samples collected during the course of pregnancies: 1) transcriptome using cell-free mRNAs (collaboration with Illumina), 2) methylome using cell-free DNA based on the 6-letter kit from Biomodal (previously known as Cambridge Epigenetix), and 3) proteome based on the Olink platform (funded by Wellcome Leap). The overarching aim of these projects is to find clinically useful biomarkers that have predictive performance in early detection of complicated pregnancies such as preeclampsia and fetal growth restriction. I recently reported the transcriptome landscape of the human placenta in health and disease (Gong et al., Nat Commun 2021) and developed a web application using R Shiny to visualise various types of transcripts we found in the placenta (https://www.obgyn.cam.ac.uk/placentome/).