Jake (June-Koo) Lee

Dr. Jake (June-Koo) Lee

PhD in Medical Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2020)
MD, Seoul National University; Medical resident, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
June-Koo Lee

June-Koo (Jake) Lee is a physician-scientist pursuing novel anticancer therapeutics based on his research experience in clinical oncology and cancer genomics.

He was honored his medical degree with summa cum laude at Seoul National University College of Medicine, South Korea in 2008. He did his internal medicine residency in Seoul National University Hospital. During his residency years (from 2009 to 2013), he did his medical oncology research focusing on the molecular targeted therapy in lung cancer. His meta-analysis of clinical trials provided a clinical guidance on appropriate indication of EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (Lee et al. 2014 JAMA; PMID 24715074), and he also designed and led the first investigator-initiated, phase II clinical trial of vandetanib in patients with lung adenocarcinoma harboring RET rearrangement (Lee et al. 2017 Ann Oncol; PMID 27803005).

After his residency years, he started his translational cancer research using cancer genomics at the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). There he pursued his academic interest on the histologic transformation process that occurs during EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor treatments, and found out the early divergent clonal evolutionary history of small cell carcinomas transformed from lung adenocarcinomas with a proposal of clinically applicable biomarkers (dual inactivation of Rb and p53; Lee et al. 2017 J Clin Oncol; PMID 28498782). Based on this work, he received his Ph.D. degree in 2017.

He joined the Park lab in 2017 as a research fellow, and he is focusing on the genomic instability process generating the cancer driver mutations from large-scale whole-genome sequencing datasets.

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