Mingnan Chen portrait
  • Member, Nano Institute of Utah
  • Assistant Professor, Molecular Pharmaceutics
  • Assistant Professor, Molecular Pharmaceutics
  • Associate Professor, Molecular Pharmaceutics
  • Member, Huntsman Cancer Institute
801-581-7616

Education

  • B. Sc, College of Aquaculture, Jimei University. Project: Characterization of Blood Cells of the Chinese Soft-shelled Turtle (Honors Thesis)
  • M. Sc., College of Life Science, Peking University. Project: Biosafety Assessment of the Transgenic Bt. Cotton to Fish
  • Ph. D., Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Connecticut. Project: The role of tapasin in MHC class I antigen presentation

Research Interests

Dr. Mingnan Chen is interested in the development and study of protein therapeutics that are able to modulate immunity or treat immune disorders. In the last several years, his research program has fruited in three research areas:

  1. developing better therapeutics for patients with autoimmune diseases,
  2. developing cancer immunotherapeutic for patients who do not respond to existing immunotherapeutic, and
  3. developing biocompatible polypeptides as formulation materials for vaccines and cancer chemotherapeutics.

In the first area, Dr. Chen’s laboratory was able to create a PD-1 immune cell-targeted therapy to treat autoimmune diseases. The therapy not only reverses the course of the disease progression but also avoids immune deficiency that is often associated with the treatment of autoimmune disease (Nature Biomedical Engineering (2019) 3, 292-305). Thus, the therapy is likely a better therapeutic option for autoimmune disease patients. In the second area, the research team led by Dr. Chen developed an innovative approach to “tag” tumor cells that otherwise are indivisible to immune recognition and hence resist to existing cancer immunotherapy. Benefited by this tagging approach, these cancer patients may benefit from a wide range of cancer immunotherapies. In the third area, Dr. Chen’s group invented a new class of biocompatible materials /polypeptides, iTEPs. iTEPs have been proven to be instrumental as drug formulation materials that potentiate cancer vaccines and chemotherapeutics (Biomaterials (2018) 182, 92-103).

Dr. Chen’s research is currently supported by the National Institute of Health and private research foundations such as the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.