Wan Lab

Current Research Funding

• NIH/NCI, P30CA082709-20, Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center Support Grant (Module PI)
  The goal is to support The Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center which organizes and facilitates cancer research, education, patient care, and cancer control and prevention and to fund the Center's five research programs and seven shared facilities.
• NIH U54, Alzheimer's Disease Drug Discovery Center (co-I)
  The goal of the study is to integrate sophisticated capability for early drug discovery and contribute to a more broad study of emerging Alzheimer’s Disease target hypothesis with the goal of generating new classes of potential therapeutics.
• Walther Cancer Foundation, Collaborative Core for Cancer Bioinformatics and Bioinformatics Training (co-PI, IU subcontract)
  The Collaborative Core for Cancer Bioinformatics (C3B) has provided services for cancer scientists at Indiana University and Purdue University. The goal of this program is to enhance training of junior bioinformaticians, especially the graduate student from the Indiana University and Purdue University, in state-of-the-art bioinformatics to assist the C3B teams. The unofficial training process has been very successful and the C3B Executive Committee, the governing body of C3B, now wishes to formalize and expand the training program in the current application as well as expand the core to enable timely completion of projects.
• NIH R01, Transcriptional Factor SOX2, Lncrna HBL1, MicroRNA1 and PRC2 Epigenetic Complex Compose A Network to Orchestrate Cardiac Differentiation from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells (co-I)
  The goal of the project is to explore the novel mechanism of nuclear HBL1 in initiating the cardiac gene-expressing program via interacting with polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) and microRNA1 (MIR1). We will test a hypothesis that HBL1 adds a new layer of human- specific regulatory mechanism on top of a conserved cardiogenic axis. All together, the central hypothesis is that transcriptional factor SOX2, lncRNA HBL1, microRNA-1 and PRC2 complex composite a whole network to control human cardiogenesis from pluripotent stem cells.
• NIH R01, Metabolic Regulation of PD-L1 in CD11c+ Cells (co-I)
  The goal of the project is to characterize developmental and metabolic regulation of PD-L1 expression in CD11c+, PD-L1 expression of CD11c+ cells in regulating T cell proliferation and functions, and PD-L1 expression of CD11c+ cells in tumor stimulation.
• AHA, Transformational Project Award Dissecting essential roles of ARID1A in controlling cardiac and neural differentiation from human pluripotent stem cells (co-I)
  The goal of the study is to understand the different roles of ARID1A in controlling cell differentiations, especially for cardiac and neural cells from human pluripotent stem cells.
• American Cancer Society, Role of microRNA-29 in pancreatic cancer tumor-stromal biology (co-I)
  The goals of the studies to explore what critical role miR-29 plays in tumor-stromal biology and that modulation of its expression will normalize the reactive stroma and enhance drug efficacy. Specific aims: To (1) identify and functionally characterize physiologically relevant targets of miR-29 in PSCs and cancer cells; (2) determine the in vivo mechanism and effect of miR-29 and its targets in PSCs or cancer cells on tumor stroma/growth; and (3) develop clinically capable rAAV vectors to modulate miR-29 expression in the pancreata of genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs) of pancreatic cancer.
• NIH SBIR, Open scalable software infrastructure for metabolomics data integration (co-I)
  The goals of the study to guide the development of the software platform to integrate multiplatform metabolomics data.