Research Fellow
Translational Immunology Institute/Singapore Health Services Pte Ltd (Singhealth), Singapore
Leong Jing Yao is an Assistant Professor in Duke-NUS, Singapore and concurrently holds a Senior Research Fellow position in Translational Immunology Institute, Singhealth, Singapore. He specialises in T cell biology, in aspects of translational and basic immunology, with strong interest in autoimmune arthritis (juvenile idiopathic arthritis/rheumatoid arithritis), infectious disease (Covid), human fetal immunology and allergy (house dust mites). He uses high dimensional single cell immune-phenotyping tools e.g. CyToF or SC-RNAseq, in an attempt to understand and unravel complex disease ateiologies or characterising normal physiology. In pediatric arhritis, he discovered the subclinical presence of persistent CD4 memory subsets in patients prior to relapse after therapy withdrawal of TNFi biologics. This CD4 memory subset is predictive of therapeutic clinical fate and demostrates the concept of cellular theragnostics. In the domain of human fetal immunology, he has explored the immuno-competence of T cell functionality in early gestation with CyToF profiling, to understand the scale of post-thymic T cell programming during early development
