November 15, 2009

DOD Breast Cancer Postdoctoral Fellowship Award

Program Review Committees

Dear Review Committee Members:

It is my great pleasure to write this letter in

recommendation of Dr. Xu Zhi for supporting her
application of DOD Breast Cancer Postdoctoral Fellowship
Award, as she is an excellent researcher with
extraordinary scientific ability.

I am the Professor/Chairman of the Department of

Obstetrics and Gynecology in Osaka City University
Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka, Japan. Dr. Zhi
graduated from China Medical University in 1999, and then
worked as a medical doctor in Beijing, China until she
came to our department in Japan. She has been worked on
her Ph.D. degree from April 2004 to March 2008 here, and
I was deeply impressed by Dr. Zhi’s scientific ability
and highly self-motivated research attitude.

During the Ph.D. course, Dr. Zhi has accumulated

abundant experience on gynecological cancer research. She
aimed at the molecular mechanisms underlying endometrial
cancer, which is the most common malignant tumor of the
female genital system in developed countries. She hopes
to find out the characteristic alterations of gene
expression in endometrial cancer, which could be helpful
to elucidate the pathogenic and therapeutic intervention
of endometrial cancer. She adopted a rare endometrial
cancer cell line (HHUA) expressing the estrogen receptor,
and investigated the angiogenesis- and apoptosis-related
genes based on quantitative real-time RT-PCR assays. This
study showed the characteristic gene expression of VEGF
and Bcl-2 and, for the first time revealed the fact that
ERα and ERβ expression in HHUA cells was converse to that
in normal endometria, which should be taken into
consideration to understand the biological particularity
of endometrial cancer cells. The results have been
published in International Journal of Oncology, 31 (6):
1333-1338, 2007. Dr. Zhi also continued her work on
endometrial cancer study to detect gene expression
variation under the induction of 17β-estradiol, 4-
Hydroxytamoxifen and the pure ER antagonist ICI182,780,
as well as to investigate gene mutations of tumor
suppressor p53 by DNA sequencing, etc. Other than the in
vitro studies, an animal experiment on mouse reproductive
hormone receptor expression was published in
International Journal of Molecular Medicine, 20 (3): 287-
292, 2007. Dr. Zhi works very effectively, and on the
other hand, she is a modest researcher and always
cooperates very well with other investigators.

Due to Dr. Xu Zhi’s excellent work, I enthusiastically

hope that the DOD Breast Cancer Postdoctoral Fellowship
Award will fund her for her study on breast cancer. I
believe that she could make much progress, and could
contribute great efforts to breast cancer research.

Sincerely yours,

Osamu Ishiko, M.D. & Ph.D.

Professor/Chairmen of Department of Obstetrics and

Gynecology
Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine
1-4-3 Asahimachi, Abeno-ku, Osaka 545-8585, Japan
Tel: +81-6-6645-3862 Fax: +81-6-6646-5800
E-mail: obandg@med.osaka-cu.ac.jp