Anatomy & Physiology: Current Research
Open Access

Hexin Chen

Biography

He received his Ph.D. from the the University of Nebraska in 2000 and was trained as a molecular cellular biologist. He did his postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine which was focused on studying the role of HOX genes in mammary gland development and breast tumorigenesis, and was supported by two of my fellowship grants from Susan Komen Foundation and Department of Defense Breast Cancer Program respectively. As a Research Faculty at Johns Hopkins, he generated an MMTV-HOXB7 transgenic mouse model to investigate how overexpression of HOXB7 regulates Her2/neu-induced mammary tumorigenesis. This work was rewarding and resulted in a few publications and an ACS Research Scholar Grant award also expanded my research into the HER2/neu signaling study.  In 2008 he joined the University of South Carolinaas a tenure-track faculty member. During the past few years he carried out a proteomic analysis to identify HER2-downstream genes, performed high throughput screening to find novel PI3K/AKT pathway inhibitors, utilized in vitro and in vivo assays to isolate and characterize cancer stem cells from primary tumors of MMTV-Her2 transgenic mice and optimized the culture condition to grow cancer stem cells in vitro. His current research is supported by grants from National Institute of Health (NIH), American Cancer Society (ACS) and Elsa Pardee Cancer Research foundation.

Research Interest

Mammary gland development, mammary stem cells, cancer stem cells, breast tumorigenesis, oncogene and tumor suppressor gene, endocrinology, estrogen receptor and HER2/Erbb2 signaling