2020-05-13 07:00:00
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Bulletin Spring 2005: Zhijian Chen, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas - Dallas, TX / Bulletin Sep 2005: Researchers have discovered a surprise lurking inside mitochondria, the power plants that are present in every cell. It turns out that these powerhouses also contain a protein that triggers the immune system to attack viral invaders. According to the researchers, the new role makes perfect biological and evolutionary sense because it fits well with another function of mitochondria as executioners of a biochemical cascade that causes programmed cell death, or apoptosis. "This is the first protein known to be involved in the immune response that is found in mitochondria," said Zhijian "James" Chen, an HHMI investigator at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Chen and his colleagues reported the discovery on August 25, 2005, in an immediate early publication of the journal Cell.

Zhijian (James) Chen, PhD

Herman Beerman Lecture

Title: Igniting Immune and Autoimmune Responses with cGAS

Zhijian ‘James’ Chen is an Investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He is also Director of Inflammation Research Center and George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science at UT Southwestern. Prior to moving to Dallas, Chen was a senior scientist at ProScript Inc. where he helped discover the proteasome inhibitor VELCADE, a medicine used for the treatment of multiple myeloma. After joining UT Southwestern in 1997, Chen discovered the regulatory role of ubiquitination in protein kinase activation in the NF-kB and MAP kinase pathways. In addition, he discovered the Mitochondrial Antiviral Signaling (MAVS) protein that reveals a new role of mitochondria in immunity. More recently, Chen discovered cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) as a cytosolic DNA sensor and a new cyclic di-nucleotide signaling pathway that mediate innate immune responses in animal cells. For his work, Chen has received numerous honors including the National Academy of Science Award in Molecular Biology (2012), the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Merck Award (2015), the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences from the Foundation of NIH (2018) and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2019). Chen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

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