Jianjun Chen
City of Hope, USA
Dr. Jianjun Chen is currently a Full Professor & Chair of the Department of Systems Biology, City of Hope. He is also the Deputy Director of The Center for RNA Biology and Therapeutics at City of Hope. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. degree from Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China, and then conducted postdoc training with Dr. Janet D. Rowley at University of Chicago. He launched his independent laboratory at the end of 2008 in the Department of Medicine at University of Chicago. Before joining City of Hope in October 2017, Dr. Chen had been serving as an Associate Professor (with tenure) of Cancer Biology at the University of Cincinnati and more earlier as an Assistant Professor at University of Chicago. Dr. Chen was named The Simms/Mann Family Foundation Endowed Professor, and a Scholar of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). Dr. Chen has published over 150 papers, including more than 20 senior-authored papers published in Nature, Cell and their associated journals such as Nature Biotechnology, Nature Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, Cancer Cell, Cell stem Cell, and Molecular Cell, etc.
The Chen laboratory is interested in discovering novel genetic/epigenetic regulations and the associated molecular mechanisms of both protein-coding genes and non-coding RNAs (e.g., microRNAs) in normal developmental processes (e.g., hematopoiesis) and tumorigenesis (e.g., leukemogenesis). In recent years, Dr. Chen and colleagues have been focusing on both basic and translational research associated with RNA/DNA epigenetics, especially RNA methylation/demethylation related to the N6 methyladenosine (m6A) machinery and DNA demethylation related to the TET1/2/3 family, and have developed several small-molecule compound inhibitors to selectively target cancer-related RNA/DNA epigenetic modifiers that hold therapeutic potential. Dr. Chen is an internationally renowned pioneer and leader in the field of RNA cancer epigenetics (or RNA Cancer Epitranscriptomics). His studies have demonstrated the functional importance of RNA modifications (especially m6A modification) and the associated modulator genes in cancer initiation, progression metastasis, and drug resistance, cancer stem cell self-renewal, cancer metabolism and tumor immune evasion, etc. The ultimate goal of the Chen lab is to translate the laboratory discoveries into the development of effective novel therapeutic strategies to treat cancers in the clinic.