Extrachromosomal DNA and Cancer Development with King Hung

King is currently a graduate student in the Howard Chang Lab at Stanford. In this conversation, we discuss everything from the beginning of his scientific career to extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) and cancer drug development. King went to college at the University of Washington where he became passionate about developmental biology. The beauty of a FISH experiment hooked King to lab work and set him on a path to become a world-class biologist.

He chose to go to graduate school at Stanford and join the Chang Lab to bring together various genomic tools to study cancer development. King was recently the lead author on a Nature paper discovering ecDNA hubs and establishing a set of rules on how these hubs increase oncogene expression. Extrachromosomal DNA is thought to increase tumor proliferation through amplification and increases in expression of oncogenes. King's work found that there are clusters of 10-100 ecDNA hubs within the nucleus that promote oncogene overexpression. Within these hubs, an individual ecDNA is more likely to express an oncogene when it spatially clusters with other ecDNAs. The paper combines chemical perturbation to verify tethers for these hubs, CRISPRi screening to map out enhancer-gene activation relationships within an ecDNA, high-resolution imaging, and 3D genome tools. Truly a tour de force.

This work sets the table for an entirely new class of druggable targets and pathways for cancer development. At the end of the conversation, we discuss the potential to drug ecDNA hubs and King's future work in the field. It's obvious from his research and his commitment to excellence, King is going to continue putting out groundbreaking research in genomics, cancer, and more.