Wong Chee Wai

Wong Chee-Wai is a post-doctoral fellow in Early-life Microbial Immunology group. Wong Chee-Wai completed his PhD in Biomedical Science (Curtin University, 2018) under the tutelage of Prof Coombe. Here, he was dissecting the role of the dermal fibroblast-derived matrix on regulating keratinocyte self-renewal and differentiation. In this study, he highlighted that a native extracellular matrix that mimics the skin dermal microenvironment is required to elicit the correct signalling pathways to facilitate the self-renewal capability of keratinocytes. Furthermore, he has revealed that the compositional differences of ECM during skin development could influence the gene expression of keratinocyte stem cell.

Following this, he has completed a Post-Doctoral training with Prof. Ferdinand von Meyenn at ETH Zurich. Here, he has been looking into the role of metabolism in regulating the epigenome during early embryonic development using next-gen sequencing. In one study, he and his collaborators have shown the potential role of H3K18la in tissue specific enhancers, which have been accepted for publication in Genome Biology.

Currently, he is working on delineating the role of microbiome in early life priming of the human immune system. Here, he would be using Spatial-sequencing technologies to better understand the microbiome-immune system interaction. The outcome of this study has wide implication on understanding early-life infections, childhood immunity and long-term disease tolerance (autoimmunity and allergies).