Mingxing Teng, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology & Immunology at Baylor College of Medicine. Mingxing Teng was recruited from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he was a postdoctoral fellow in 2022 with the help of a CPRIT Recruitment of First-Time, Tenure-Track Faculty Members award. Dr. Teng received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry and began his postdoctoral fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2018. Dr. Teng combines his expertise in synthetic chemistry, chemical biology, and medicinal chemistry to decipher valuable yet daunting drug targets implicated in formidable cancers.
Through the creation and characterization of new bioactive small molecules, chemical biology provides essential tools for understanding the underlying biology of cancer. The knowledge of how small molecules can be therapeutically relevant is then leveraged to develop new medicines for cancer treatment.
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Mingxing Teng, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology & Immunology at Baylor College of Medicine. Mingxing Teng was recruited from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he was a postdoctoral fellow in 2022 with the help of a CPRIT Recruitment of First-Time, Tenure-Track Faculty Members award. Dr. Teng received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry and began his postdoctoral fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2018. Dr. Teng combines his expertise in synthetic chemistry, chemical biology, and medicinal chemistry to decipher valuable yet daunting drug targets implicated in formidable cancers.
Through the creation and characterization of new bioactive small molecules, chemical biology provides essential tools for understanding the underlying biology of cancer. The knowledge of how small molecules can be therapeutically relevant is then leveraged to develop new medicines for cancer treatment. However, a common issue is that the chemical structures included in commercially available covalent fragment libraries are often too simple to be further optimized for more reversible binding contributions. Dr. Teng turned his attention to natural products, believing that they are well-suited as a source of novel fragments due to their diverse scaffolds and rich functional groups. Furthermore, he claimed that natural products are biologically pre-validated as during their biosynthesis, they have already interacted with various enzymes. Dr. Teng’s team is building a unique natural product-derived covalent fragment library by adopting a strategy of structural cut-and-sew to strike a balance between synthetic feasibility and structural uniqueness. His team and collaborators use this library to develop drug-like molecules targeting therapeutic protein targets associated with pancreatic cancer in parallel. His long-term goal is to translate the findings of his cancer chemical biology research into new therapies through the creation of spin-off companies or partnerships, providing benefits to cancer patients that were previously unavailable. Teng highlighted the essential role played by the CPRIT recruitment awards in facilitating the establishment of his laboratory and noted the significance of the strong research community formed by CPRIT scholars, which has enabled the pooling of expertise and knowledge from diverse fields to advance cancer prevention research in Texas.
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