Won Jae Huh, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pathology at Yale School of Medicine, was recently welcomed to the Cancer Signaling Networks (CSN) Research Program at Yale Cancer Center (YCC).
Dr. Huh is a physician-scientist with clinical expertise in Gastrointestinal Pathology and Principal Investigator with the Huh Lab, which is focused on understanding the process of cell plasticity and the underlying mechanisms in preneoplastic lesions in the stomach and liver with a goal of identifying novel therapeutic targets.
Dr. Huh’s work has shown that Notch signaling is downstream of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) signaling in gastric premalignant condition Ménétrier’s disease (MD) and Notch signaling inhibition rescues biochemical and histological features of this disorder in a mouse model of MD. In addition to plasticity, Dr. Huh is interested in cell differentiation, liver, metaplasia, stem cells, stomach, stomach neoplasms, cell dedifferentiation, and the EGF family of proteins.
Dr. Huh is the latest world-class investigator to join the CSN Research Program, which utilizes the vast research talent at YCC to understand fundamentals of key pathways that drive carcinogenesis and cancer progression, with the goal of enabling development and improvement of effective targeted cancer therapeutics. These investigators study fundamental aspects of signal transduction and develop novel technologies that can be applied to both basic and translational research,
Dr. Huh finished his medical education at the Seoul National University in South Korea, then pursued PhD training in Developmental Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. His PhD thesis work with Dr. Jason Mills focused on thr transcriptional regulation of gastric chief cell differentiation.
He completed his residency training in Anatomic Pathology at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, followed by fellowship in Gastrointestinal and Liver Pathology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Before coming to Yale, Dr. Huh was an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.