Jayoung Kim, PhD

Department	Urology
Hospital Title	Staff Scientist
Academic Title	Assistant Professor of Surgery
Phone	617-919-2639
Fax	617-730-0238
Email	Jayoung Kim
Location	300 Longwood Avenue Boston MA 02115

Research Overview

Jayoung Kim is committed to an academic career in basic science studies in the field of urological research. For the past almost 10 years at Children's Hospital Boston, her research interest had primarily been in three areas, prostate and bladder cancer, and interstitial cystitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (IC/CPPS), through the cutting-edge cellular and molecular studies of genitourinary tract pathophysiology. More specifically, her lab is investigating:

1. Understand mechanism of IC/CPPS to identify targets for therapeutic purpose: She is interested in non-malignant conditions that affect the bladder. In a collaboration with the Susan Keay group at U. of Maryland, she discovered that the sialoglycopeptide, anti-proliferative factor (APF), a urine biomarker of IC, signals in human urothelial cells by activating the transcription factor, p53, and this finding was one of the first mechanistic studies of signal transduction processes elicited by APF. She also is trying to identify IC/CPPS urine biomarkers (protein and metabolites) under close collaborations with other urologists.
2. Determine the correlation of cholesterol metabolism and prostate diseases progression:In a separate series of studies, she and her colleagues have found that the cholesterol in prostate cancer cell membranes regulates prostate cancer growth and neuroendocrine differentiation and promotes aggressive disease. These observations, which may be relevant to the tumor-promoting effects of the Western diet in the case of prostate cancer, are being expanded by her team using the genomic and proteomic strategies combined with systems biology tools to define the molecular signature and target-able genes against prostate diseases including BPH, CPPS and cancer.
3. Investigate the molecular function of nuclear EGFR in bladder cancer progression: She has also made a number of important discoveries that we believe are relevant to bladder cancer progression. Her studies have shown that the EGFR receptor tyrosine kinase routed through the nucleus in aggressive tumor cells. The most recent projects are expanding our understanding of the HB-EGF/EGFR nuclear trafficking network and provide new insight into the regulatory role of the nuclear EGFR, which has been shown by others to play a role as a transcription factor in hyper-proliferation of malignant cells. Components of the trafficking function were discovered in her lab from mass spectrometric analyses. Her team believes the studies will lead to the identification of new drug targets for the treatment of bladder cancer.

About Jayoung (Jay) Kim

Dr. Kim received a PhD from Korea and completed post-doctoral training at the Children's Hospital Boston. She has received research awards from Harvard Medical School, New York Academy in Medicine, and Interstitial Cystitis Association. She is also an American Urological Association Foundation Research Scholar and an Eleanor and Miles Shore Scholar at Harvard Medical School (2009).

Key Publications