Heads of Laboratories
Assistant Professor
Laboratory of Chemical Biology and Microbial Pathogenesis
hhang@rockefeller.edu
Microbial and viral pathogens pose tremendous health concerns, and a greater understanding of their mechanisms of infection is critical for the development of novel therapies. The complex interactions between the pathogen and the host most often occur at the protein level, where posttranslational modifications to those proteins can be essential. Dr. Hang is interested in understanding how these posttranslational modifications affect virulence, and how novel drugs may perturb them to fight infection.
Through the development of new chemical tools, biochemistry and cell biology, Dr. Hang explores pathogen virulence from the perspectives of both the invading organism and the host immune system. His goals include identifying bacterial proteins needed for infection and their essential posttranslational modifications, such as lipidation or glycosylation, as well as identifying small-molecule inhibitors of pathways involved in posttranslational modifications. Dr. Hang is also interested in identifying bacterial peptides that can elicit a host immune response and how those antigens are effectively processed and presented to immune cells.
The proteins on the outer membrane of bacteria are essential for their ability to interact with the host immune system, and they represent ideal targets for therapeutic intervention. Posttranslational modifications, such as lipidation and glycosylation, are required for proper synthesis and localization of these proteins to the outside of the bacteria. The characterization of how these modifications are made is critical for understanding the microbial life cycle and their mechanisms of infection. Dr. Hang is interested in developing new chemical tools to analyze both the mechanisms and protein targets of lipidation and glycosylation and their role in bacterial pathogenesis.
A second goal of the Hang laboratory is to study lipidation and glycosylation through the identification of small molecules that perturb these pathways. Specific small molecules can be powerful tools for dissecting out the complex biological processes that normally occur on rapid time scales. However, to be effective, the targets of the small molecules must be identified at the molecular level. Traditional methods of identifying small molecules present various difficulties and can be impractical. Dr. Hang is designing new approaches to facilitate small-molecule target identification through the creation of target-encoded small-molecule libraries for cell-based assays.
Finally, Dr. Hang is working to understand what is necessary for the immune system to develop a strong response to a diseasecausing organism. He is planning to develop chemical methods to study what type of antigenic epitope is necessary to stimulate an effective immune response, as well as how it is processed and presented. New vaccine development hinges on the identification of bacterial peptides that can generate an effective immune response, but very little is known about which peptides are effective. In addition, posttranslational modifications of those peptides can help the bacteria evade immune system detection, and those peptides are often hard to identify in the lab. Dr. Hang combines chemical labeling of bacterial proteins with mass spectrometry analysis for the identification of peptides that have been processed and presented by immune cells, which should facilitate the discovery of antigenic peptides for vaccine candidates.
CAREER
Dr. Hang received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1998 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003. He was a postdoc at Harvard Medical School and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and joined Rockefeller in 2007 as assistant professor.
Dr. Hang received an Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar Award in Aging in 2008. He became a Damon Runyon Cancer
Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in 2004.
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