Zhang Lab
Principal Investigator: Weizhou Zhang
Institution: University of Florida (Gainesville, FL)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Project Summary-Abstract Renal cell carcinomas (RCC) are among the 10 most common cancer types in man (6th) and woman (8th) worldwide. Most RCC are clear cell carcinomas (>80%) that represent an atypical cancer type in many ways including the intrinsic resistance to many chemotherapeutics, sensitivity to anti-neoangiogenesis, and sensitivity to immune checkpoint inhibitors but with very low mutational burden. The treatment landscape of RCC has been changing rapidly in the last couple of years but still with very low complete response rate even with the most updated treatment regimens. Those “atypical” features of RCC prompted us to perform a comprehensive single cell RNA sequencing for human ccRCCs and paired bloods. We found that tumor induced Tregs are highly suppressive to effector T cells and could be the major immune cells conferring the immune suppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). These TI-Tregs have the typical signs of cellular senescence, including the expression of p16, p21, BCL-XL, senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), and the activation of β-galactosidase (β-Gal). The group recently reported the development of the first-in-class BCL-XL degraders, i.e. th…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01CA269661-04: Exploring novel therapeutic strategies for combinatory therapy to treat renal clear cell carcinomas (2026)
- 5R01CA290792-03: Proteolysis targeting chimera against nuclear receptor NR4A1 for melanoma therapy (2026)
- 5R01CA290792-02: Proteolysis targeting chimera against nuclear receptor NR4A1 for melanoma therapy (2025)
- 5R01CA269661-03: Exploring novel therapeutic strategies for combinatory therapy to treat renal clear cell carcinomas (2025)
- 5R01CA260239-05: Proteolysis-targeting chimera against BCL-XL inhibits breast cancer metastasis (2025)
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