Clooney is a PhD student in Professor Danny Leung’s group at HKUST. His research focuses on the role and clinical significance of retrotransposon-driven transcripts in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most prevalent form of primary liver cancer and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. By integrating epigenomic and transcriptomic analyses of patient-derived tumour samples and tumor-adjacent normal controls, Clooney has uncovered that global DNA hypomethylation drives widespread retrotransposon dysregulation in HCC. Notably, he found that high expression of a HERVE-int element-driven long non-coding RNA is not only associated with more aggressive tumors , but also molecular signatures of favourable responses to immunotherapy. In this meeting, Clooney aims to explore recent advances in single-cell and long-read sequencing technologies and their applications in studying retrotransposons in normal development and diseases.