Professor Roger D. Kornberg, Principal Investigator

Principal Investigators: Professors Roger Kornberg, Qing Li, Zhong Wang, Young-Joon Kim, Linwoo Kang, Yuichiro Takagi.

The goals of our group are to promote the potential of developing new drugs to treat various diseases, such as infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and notably, cancers. The team is lead by the world’s most pre-eminent scientist, Nobelist Dr. Roger Kornberg.

Dr. Kornberg is a professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine, fellow of National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Foreign Member of Royal Society.  He made the major discovery that transmission of gene regulatory signals to the RNA polymerase machinery is accomplished by an additional protein complex that they dubbed Mediator.  Dr. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the molecular mechanism of eukaryotic transcription which is the first step and the key control point in the pathway of gene expression.

In 2012, the team lead by Dr. Kornberg won the 3rd Introduced Innovative R&D Team Leadership of Guangdong Province.  Team members include six of his former graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in Stanford University.  The members are working as either faculties of US and Korea universities or scientists of pharmaceutical companies.

Our research is motivated by the pivotal yet underappreciated value of drug development based on structural and functional information of cancer-associated multiprotein complexes as well as by the dearth of procedures for obtaining and analyzing these complexes. The Kornberg group has extensive experience in functional and structural studies of large, asymmetrical, multi-protein complexes implicated in gene activation, transcription, and chromatin biology.  In addition, years of research endeavors on multiple protein complexes of the Kornberg group have successfully led to discovery of a number of antiviral therapeutics for human diseases.  The establishment of our unique platforms for high yield stable cell line development (>1g production per liter), protein engineering, antibody humanization and optimization, and large scale antibody production, will facilitate novel large molecule drug development. In summary, we plan to employ our unique expertise and breakthrough technologies to dissect critical multiprotein complexes in many other aspects, especially cancer pathways and to develop new targeted drugs of high specificity and potency in a rational knowledge-based manner.

Research interests:
(1) Investigations of structure and functions of the disease related multi-protein complexes 
(2) Studies of enzyme catalytic mechanism and specific inhibitor screening
(3) Microenvironment studies of tumor cell transformation and progression
(4) Development of novel technologies for therapeutic monoclonal antibodies

Facilities
The group has invested more than 20M RMB for state-of-art equipments machines such as Opti-Matix maker system, ultracentrifuge, high-throughput automated DanaPro system, sorting flow cytometer, DropArray high-throughput cell work station.