Research Focus

Dr. Chen's group focuses on bridging genetic and genomic discoveries to cancer immunology. They develop novel animal models to dissect the role of autoimmunity in inflammation-driven cancer development and antitumor immunity. His team tackles the mechanisms by which immune dysregulation and inflammation promote de novo cancer development and on the other hand, self-antigen specific autoimmunity mediates tumor killing. In collaboration with computational biologists, his team is also engaged in studies of cancer genomes, transcriptomes and epigenomes during evolution of premalignant and cancer cells in chronic inflammation. Their research have led to a number of discoveries including autoimmune tumorigenesis caused by CTLA4 insufficiency, autoimmunity-mediated antitumor immunity which reveals tumors as an immune privileged self transcriptome diversification in cancer by alternative splicing reprograming, and epigenetic dysregulation during aging-associated carcinogenesis.