Houston Methodist/ Weill-Cornell Med
Houston, United States
Kyuson Yun, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology at Houston Methodist/Weill-Cornell Medical College. She received her B.S. and Ph.D. from Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena. Since starting her independent position at the Jackson Laboratory, her lab has focused on elucidating the origins and functions of brain cancer stem cells, using genetically engineered mouse models and human patient samples (primary tumorsphere cultures and patient-derived xenografts (PDX) models). Her projects in brain cancer stem cells have led to investigations in the tumor microenvironment. Currently, a major focus of her lab is elucidating role of brain cancer-associated immune cells in tumor progression and therapy resistance, and analyzing the heterogeneity and cell:cell communication among cancer and immune cells in GBM and medulloblastoma at the single cell level.
Dr. Yun’s major contributions to the field include the first demonstration of the existence of cancer stem cells in a spontaneous mouse model of solid tumor. Her group was also the first to characterize cancer stem cells from a mouse brain tumor model and identify a gene signature that distinguishes glioma stem cells from non-stem glioma cells and normal neural stem cells. More recently, her laboratory published the largest single-cell RNA-sequencing data set from human GBM, and defined nine molecular subtypes of GBM-associated myeloid cells. Furthermore, they demonstrated that this dataset can be used to identify and selectively target immune suppressive regulators in myeloid and T cells to reprogram the immune microenvironment and extend survival. Dr. Yun is an American Cancer Society Research Scholar, and services a member of the Scientific Advisory Council member for the American Brain Tumor Association and an Editorial Board member for Scientific Reports (a Nature journal).