Dr Quanhua Mu is an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degree from Nankai University, and then completed PhD and postdoc training in professor Jiguang Wang’s lab at HKUST, studying brain tumor evolution and drug resistance.
Working with local and global collaborators, his research revealed (i) targetable MET exon 14 skipping in secondary glioblastoma (Cell, 2018), (ii) novel MGMT gene fusions driving temozolomide resistance (Nat Comm 2020), (iii) MYC activation promoting hypermutation of recurrent gliomas (Sci Transl Med, 2023), and (iv) DNA amplification as driver of drug resistance in mammalian cells (PNAS, 2023). The secondary glioblastoma study was recognized as one of the top 10 research advances in life sciences of China in 2018, and the MGMT fusion study was elected as one of the top 10 research advances in glioma research of China in 2020.