Eminent biologist Chen to discuss innate immunity in fight against cancer and autoimmune disease
By Patrick Wascovich
For more than 500 years, medical practitioners have tried to defeat infectious diseases by taking advantage of the body’s ability to defend itself. The earliest recorded attempts in Turkey and China in the 1400s focused on preventing outbreaks of smallpox by placing the dried crusts of smallpox pustules into small cuts in the skin. By doing so, they were activating the adaptive immune system, the body’s customized response to specific infections.
Over the past several decades, however, the body’s innate immune system has emerged as a new potential front line in battling a variety of diseases. The innate immune system – which provides the body’s first, generalized response to infectious invasion – has the potential to not only be leveraged to activate responses to bacteria, viruses and parasites, it also provides possibilities for drug therapies that can avoid resistance by the body’s natural defenses.
Harnessing this inherent safeguard could thus provide important keys to understanding and treating a myriad of human diseases ranging from infectious and autoimmune diseases to cancer.
Dr. Zhijian “James” Chen, who seamlessly combines immunology and biochemistry, has gained international renown through his efforts to understand how viruses and other microbes are detected by the innate immune system once they get inside our cells. His investigations of immune defense mechanisms in the cytoplasm, the cell’s gel-like interior, are helping to unlock those cellular mysteries while potentially paving the way for much needed, more effective disease treatments.
Dr. Chen, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UT Southwestern Medical Center who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2014, will present “The Fight Against Cancer and Autoimmune Diseases – Harnessing the Body’s Immune System” at the next President’s Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 6. The 4 p.m. presentation in the President’s Lecture Series will take place in the Tom and Lula Gooch Auditorium.
“It is very exciting, because this is relevant to human diseases,” said Dr. Chen, Professor of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern. “Immediately, we can appreciate that the advances we and others are making have potential. Because of their importance, a lot of people are now targeting the molecules that we have identified for potential therapies.”
In late 2012, the Chen laboratory published two back-to-back papers in Science that have transformed the understanding of the innate immune system. One paper reported the discovery of a novel enzyme that they named cGAS (cyclic GMP-AMP synthase), which acts as a long-sought innate immune sensor of DNA in the cytosol. The other paper reported the discovery of a small molecule, cGAMP (cyclic GMP-AMP), which is a product of cGAS and functions as a “second messenger” in innate immunity. The discovery of cGAS and cGAMP solves the century-old mystery of how DNA stimulates immune responses.
Subsequent research by Dr. Chen and many other labs throughout the world has demonstrated the critical role of the cGAS pathway in immune defense against a large variety of pathogens, including viruses, bacteria, and parasites.
Dr. Chen, who joined the faculty in 1997, said the academic setting, intellectual diversity, and ready exposure to different areas of biology at UT Southwestern combine to provide a perfect environment.
Dr. Chen grew up in a small village in southern China and earned his undergraduate degree in biology at Fujian Normal University. He received a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
In 2012, the NAS honored Dr. Chen with its Award in Molecular Biology, which recognizes “a recent notable discovery in molecular biology” by an American scientist under age 45. In 2015, Chen received the Merck Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
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Dr. Chen holds the George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science.
Dr. Podolsky holds the Philip O’Bryan Montgomery, Jr., M.D. Distinguished Presidential Chair in Academic Administration, and the Doris and Bryan Wildenthal Distinguished Chair in Medical Science.
