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Chunyan Ren

Biography

He got his BS in biological science at Nankai University, Tianjin, China. He worked in Drs. Xiaodong Zhang & Lihong Ye?s lab at Nankai University to study the role of Hepatitis B virus X (HBX) in tumorigenesis as an undergraduate student and completed my bachelor thesis with Dr. Jiankuan Xu at Tasly Group to optimize the stability of an immune system boosting peptide called thymosin ?1 using orthogonal design for formulation screening and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for peptide detection. He completed his master thesis in biomedical science under the guidance of Dr. Xiao-kun Zhang at SIBS, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China, focusing on retinoid X receptor (RXR) mediated signal transduction. As a nuclear hormone receptor, RXR can either undergo ligand-dependent trans-activation in nucleus, or translocate to cytosol to induce apoptosis. His project was to identify compounds that could bind to RXR and induce its cytosolic translocation, which may have the potential to inhibit tumor growth. He gained quite a lot of experience when he worked at ChemPartner, a leading CRO in China. Together with my colleagues, He developed and performed multiple high-throughput screening (HTS) projects mainly for GPCRs and nuclear receptors using reporter gene or fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) based assays. He completed his Ph.D. thesis in biophysics, chemical biology, and systems pharmacology in Dr. Ming-Ming Zhou?s lab at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, USA, to use various biophysical and chemical biology approaches to understand protein function and develop small molecules to modulate protein-ligand interaction, such as protein expression and purification, X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), structural-activity relationship (SAR) study, and computational methods. He is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Zhou?s lab at Mount Sinai to characterize bromodomain inhibitors and their roles in triple-negative breast cancer.

Research Interest

Drug discovery and Biophysical and chemical biology approaches to illustrate and modulate protein function