r. Xi Chen received his Ph.D. from Genome Institute of Singapore and National University of Singapore, where he studied transcriptional regulation of pluripotency and self-renewal in embryonic stem (ES) cells.

He was the first to discover the genomic regions targeted by lineage specific transcription factors cluster that exhibit cell type specific enhancer activities. He was later awarded a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society fellowship and joined Dr. Laurie Glimcher’s laboratory at Harvard School of Public Health and Weill Cornell Medical College for postdoctoral training on Endoplasmic Reticulum stress and Unfolded Protein Response (UPR) in tissue homeostasis and oncogenesis. He was one of the first to establish the molecular connection between UPR and oncogenesis.

In 2015, Dr. Chen was awarded a CPRIT scholar award and joined the Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine. His laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine focuses on the function and mechanism of ER protein quality control machinery in cancer and tissue homeostasis, with the long-term goals of elucidating the significance and mechanisms of ER proteostasis in cancer progression, metastasis and therapy resistance, and developing mechanism-based novel therapies to overcome therapy resistance and transform cancer to a manageable chronic disease.

Dr. Chen’s laboratory at BCM has developed a mechanism-based combination therapy with the IRE1α RNase inhibitor and docetaxel that completely eradicated the primary patient-derived breast tumors and prevented recurrence.