Hui Yang-INSTITUTE FOR TRANSLATIONAL BRAIN RESEARCH

Hui Yang

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Hui Yang Principal Investigator

Innate Immunity and Metabolites Signaling Transduction and Regulation

Hui Yang, PhD supervisor, is a innvestigator of Huashan Hospital/Institute for Translational Brain Research, Fudan University, who got the national youth talent support program, Shanghai Overseas High-Level Talent and Shanghai University Distinguished Professor (Oriental Scholar), etc. He graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a B.S. degree in National Life Science Base Class in 2008, and graduated from Institute of Biomedical Research , Fudan University with a Ph.D. degree in 2013. He became the recipient of Wu Rui Scholarship and his dissertation was selected as an outstanding doctoral dissertation in Shanghai. In 2014, he joined the Department of Molecular Biology/HHMI lab at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to work on the regulation and function of innate immunity. In 2019, he joined Huashan Hospital of Fudan University. Next year, he joined the Institute forTranslational Brain Research of Fudan University through mutual employment.

The main research interests of Hui Yang's group areinnateimmunity and metabolic regulation of brain diseases. His group has systematically discovered the pathophysiological significance of metabolites as "signaling molecules" in epigenetic regulation,andidentified new physiological functions of innate immune pathway cGAS-STING in regulating cellular autophagy and aging. He has published 12 important research papers in Nature, Cancer Cell (cover), Nature Metabolism, PNAS, Cell Research, EMBO Journal, Oncogene and other journals as corresponding author and the first author (including co-author), among which 5 papers have been rated as highly cited by ESI. He has been reviewed by Nature, Cell, Nature Reviews Cancer and Nature Immunology, and has been included and recommended by Faculty 1000 with more than 6000 citations.

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Innate immunity is the first barrier of the body's immune defense system.It recognizesforeignpathogensoroneself’sabnormal molecules by using aseries ofpattern recognition receptors. And those corresponding pathogenic molecules are calledpathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMP) and damage-associated molecule patterns (DAMP). Stress and cellular damageinduced by CNS abnormalitiesare often associated withthe onset and progression of several CNS diseases, which are caused bythe release of endogenous damage-associated molecules. In recent years, thediscovery andbreakthrough of the cytoplasmic DNA sensing pathway (cGAS-cGAMP-STING)haveattracted widespread attention. In addition to itsrolesin antiviral responses, our previous studiesfirstidentified theDNA-sensorcGAS asanimportantproteininvolved in chronic inflammation in vivo (Nature, 2019; PNAS,2017). Thisfindingreveals thatnumeroushumandiseasesare regulated by innateimmunity, opening a new perspective to study the pathogenesis of many human diseases and providing new clues for disease treatment, especiallyforneurological diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, andbraintumors. At the same time, we discoveredthe non-classical functions of themetabolites(Cancer Cell, 2011; Cell Research, 2014), whichcanalsofunction as "signaling molecules" to regulate the differentiation of immune cells (Nature Metabolism, 2022). This findingopensup a new directionfor the study ofmetabolism-immune interplay. We focus on the interactions between immunityandmetabolisminimmunesystem and neuron system. Byintegratingclinical resources of neurological diseases in Huashan Hospital of Fudan University,single-cellsequencing and CRISPR technology,alongwithusingexperimental animal models,neurodegenerative diseasemodels or tumor models, we hope to address thefollowing questions:

1.The molecular and cellular mechanisms ofinnateimmune recognition, activation and inflammationresponses.

2.Theinteractions amongneuro-immune-metabolismandtheregulatory mechanisms of chronic inflammation.

3.Heterogeneousanalysisof neurological disorders.

4.Drug discovery and translational research inchronic inflammatory brain diseases.

5.Translational studies of brain tumors based on immune and metabolic interventions.