Assistant Professor
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
My major interest of research is pre-clinical and clinical development of novel therapeutic strategies for leukemia and lymphoma, with enhancing understanding of the diseases. I am specially focusing on agents that interfere with the biosynthesis processes such as transcription, RNA splicing and translation, as well as the mechanism based combinations of these agents with other biological and kinase inhibitors. One major group of compounds that I have been working on are the inhibitors of CDK9. We are one of first groups to demonstrate that inhibition of transcription and down-regulation of Mcl-1 is the major action by the CDK9 inhibitors to induce apoptosis in the leukemia cells. We are actively testing these compounds both in vitro and in clinical trials, either alone or in combination with the Bcl-2 antagonist venetoclax.
I received my BS from Wuhan University in Wuhan, China, and MS from Institute of Genetics of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Then I moved to US and obtained my Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from the University of Texas Graduate school of Biomedical Sciences in Houston, Texas. I am now an assistant professor in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics, MD Anderson Cancer center.
