Prof. Ce-Shi Chen, Principle Investigator, graduated from Nankai University in 1994, obtained his Ph.D from Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1999, accepted his postdoctoral training at University of Virginia and Emory University from 1999 to 2005, was appointed as Tenure Track Assistant/Associate Professor at Albany Medical College from 2006-2010, and was recruited to Kunming Institute of Zoology, CAS in 2010. His research is mainly focused on the breast cancer targeted therapy, protein ubiquitination, gene transcription, breast cancer stem cells, and cancer animal models. He published more than 40 SCI papers in Cell Death Differ, Cancer Res, Oncogene, J Pathology, and Nat Genetics. His current H-index is 20. He has been invited to be reviewers for more than 10 funding agents and over 30 scientific journals.

Email: chenc@mail.kiz.ac.cn

Research Fields and Progress in 2013

 We are interested in breast cancer targeted therapy, specifically in stem cell, cell cycle, apoptosis, protein ubiquitination, gene transcription, animal models, drug and biomarker discovery. Our major progresses in 2013 include: 1) The functional mechanism of KLF5 in triple negative basal type breast cancer. We found that KLF5 increase the mPGES1 downstream target gene expression and PGE2 production; 2) A new E3 ubiquitin ligase BCA2 targets cell cycle dependent kinase inhibitor p21 protein for ubiquitn-mediated degradation and promotes estrogen receptor alpha positive breast cell proliferation; 3) E3 ubiquitin ligase HECTD3 promotes cancer cell survival from cisplatin and TRAIL by ubiquitinating MALT1 and Caspase-8; 4) We analyzed 19 spontaneous breast tumors from tree shrews and found that the pTEN and PI3KCA genes are mutated in five tumors. These works lays a solid foundation for future breast cancer research and treatment.

Research Team :

Laboratory Staff:

Dr. Rong Liu, Associate Professor, liurong@mail.kiz.ac.cn

Ms. Zhong-Mei Zhou , Technician , zhouzm@mail.kiz.ac.cn

Ms. Hai-Lin Zhang, Technician , zhanghl0327@mail.kiz.ac.cn

Graduate Students：

Lin Jia，Chun-Yan Wang，Jun-Ying Qin，Jing Wu，Pei-Guo Shi，Yan-Jie Kong，Xi Chen

Fu-Bing Li，Guang-Zhe Ge，Si-Yuan Li，Ming Shao