2005 Outstanding Scientific Achievements by a Young Investigator
Liu-Ying Luo, MD, PhD, is a staff scientist with R & D Systems, a company in Minneapolis, Minnesota specializing in producing protease-related reagents.
Under the guidance of Dr. Eleftherios P. Diamandis at the University of Toronto, she performed outstanding research on novel biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. She cloned and characterized a novel serine protease gene, human tissue kallikrein 10 (hK10), and developed an immunoassay to measure hK10 protein concentrations in biological fluids and tissue extracts. Dr. Luo discovered that hK10 offers potential for ovarian cancer diagnosis and prognosis. In addition, she showed that high concentrations of hK10 in breast tissue could predict tamoxifen resistance in breast cancer. To elucidate the biological roles of kallikreins in various malignancies, she extended her research into the functional characterization of the human tissue kallikreins. She was the first to purify and functionally characterize hK6 and hK10 from ovarian cancer ascites fluid and hK11, a candidate prostate cancer biomarker, from seminal plasma.
In addition, she developed immunoassays to evaluate the usefulness of previously identified ovarian and breast cancer vaccine targets and identified 7 potential targets for breast cancer and 13 for ovarian cancer (including 1 novel gene).
She has published 25 peer-reviewed papers and contributed 1 chapter to the Handbook of Proteolytic Enzymes.
She has reported 11 novel gene sequences in the GenBank database and is a co-inventor on 3 patents.
In her current position, her main focus is to develop kallikrein-related products for clinical diagnostics and research applications.
2002 The George F. Grannis Award For Excellence In Research And Scientific Publication
Liu-Ying Luo, PhD was honored with the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine’s (formerly AACC) 2002 George F. Grannis Award for Excellence in Research and Scientific Publication.