For the past two summers, I have participated in the Eugene and Ruth Roberts Summer Research Academy at City of Hope National Medical Center, working as a research intern in Dr. Wendong Huang’s laboratory in the Department of Gene Regulation and Drug Discovery. Supervised by PhD candidate Zhipeng Meng, I studied the regulatory roles of microRNAs (miRNA). These are extremely short chains of RNA molecules, only some 22 base pairs long and common to all eukaryotic cells. Many diseases, such as cancer, are associated with miRNA malfunction. Specifically, I looked into the impacts of miR-194 on liver cancer growth. We observed that miR-194 was highly expressed in healthy hepatocytes while minimally expressed in cancerous liver cells. By upregulating the expression of miR-194 in cancerous liver cells, we found a reduction in both liver cancer growth and metastasis. This exciting data has been published in Hepatology (2010; 52(6): 2148-57).