Prashant Kumar's Biography

Prashant Kumar, Faculty Scientist, Institute of Bioinformatics

Dr. Prashant Kumar received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Department of Molecular Biology, Berlin, Germany. Following this, Dr. Kumar received postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Prof. Karl Simin at the Department of Cancer Biology, University of Massachusetts (UMMS) Medical School, Worcester, USA, where he established a novel mouse model of malignant breast cancers that required improved therapeutic strategies, and was involved in studying the clinical impact of breast cancer. In his work, he showed that mammary tumors caused by the inactivation of the pRb family (pRbf) of proteins (pRb, p107, p130), together with Brca1 and p53 inactivation, mimicked several aspects of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer. This finding illustrated the compounding effect of acquiring multiple tumor suppressor mutations during tumor evolution and underscores the distinct requirements of each of these canonical tumor suppressor proteins. In June 2012, he moved to Singapore, continuing his research at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), A-STAR, in the laboratory of Prof. Jean Paul Thiery, a world renowned authority in the area of EMT (Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition). During this period, the focus of his work took on a more translational aspect, and he was involved in the development of a novel point-of-care (POC) diagnostic platform for the detection of multiple protein bladder cancer biomarkers. He was also involved in the establishment of a culture method to assess breast cancer circulating tumor cells (CTCs) harvested from blood samples of patients undergoing neoadjuvant therapy. This new technique provides an opportunity to analyze CTC clonal heterogeneity and adapt therapeutic modalities in refractory breast cancer patients. At IOB, his work is now centred on biomarker discovery for bladder cancers, using state-of-the-art quantitative proteomics approaches. He is also interested in defining the molecular pathways that underlie the malignancy associated with bladder carcinoma, with an emphasis on the biological mechanisms and regulatory relationship of EMT in cancer progression.