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Youhai Chen

Dean

MB, Ph.D

Email: yh.chen@siat.ac.cn

Dr. Chen is the founding Dean of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and director of Cancer Immunology Research Center, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his M.B. and M.Sc. degrees from Shandong University in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 1993. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. He was a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, until 2020. His research interests include immunotherapy, gene therapy, cancer, immunity, and inflammation. He has authored more than 150 research articles (H factor 64; total citation >18000 until 2021), and chaired a number of academic and administrative committees at academic or pharmaceutical institutions. He is a recipient of the Colyton Prize for Autoimmune Research and an Elected Member of the American Kunkel Society (Immunology).

Contributions to Science

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Science 1994; 265:1237. Nature 1995; 376:177

Discovered and characterized regulatory T cells induced by mucosal antigens. While working in the laboratory of Dr. Howard Weiner at Harvard University, Dr. Chen discovered that mucosal antigens induced regulatory T cells that used transforming growth factor (TGF)-b to suppress autoimmune responses, and used conventional TCR to recognize antigens. This helped establish the current paradigm of regulatory T cell biology. It made a major impact on our understanding of immune tolerance in general. His original paper published in Science has been cited for more than 2300 times.

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Nature Immunology 2003; 4:255. Science 2007; 317:675. Immunity 2009; 31:932. Nature Immunology 2010; 11:141

Discovered key roles of Rel/NF-kB family in tolerance and autoimmunity. While at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Chen’s laboratory published a series of original papers describing the critical roles of the Rel/NF-kB family in both autoimmunity and tolerance. They discovered that a novel NF-kBp50-based feedback loop controls immune tolerance; they reported a paradigm-shifting concept that a non-lineage-specific transcription factor can control T cell differentiation in a lineage-specific manner by orchestrating the formation of a lineage-specific “enhanceosome”. These discoveries helped advance our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of immune tolerance and autoimmunity, and led to the development of a c-Rel blocking drug that is being tested in preclinical trials for treating autoimmune diseases and cancer.

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Cell 2008; 133:415. Cancer Cell 2014; 26:465. Nature Immunology 2017; 18:1353. Nature 2018; 560:382.

Discovered and characterized three members of the TIPE (TNF-a-induced Protein 8-like) family. By genomic profiling of inflamed nervous tissue, Dr. Chen’s laboratory discovered, in 2002, three novel members of the TIPE family. They have since crystallized two of them and generated mice deficient in all of them. They discovered that TIPE family plays essential roles in immune homeostasis, inflammation, and carcinogenesis; they found that TIPE family is the transfer proteins of lipid second messengers PIP2 and PIP3. These ground-breaking discoveries helped deepen our understanding of the molecular pathways shared by inflammation and cancer, and provided new therapeutic opportunities for treating inflammatory and neoplastic diseases.

Research

Gene therapy, immunotherapy, inflammation, cancer, autoimmune diseases.