Yong (Tiger) Zhang, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences at the USC Mann School, has received a five-year, $2.28 million grant renewal from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue his research on how cells communicate and respond to stress.
The project, titled “Chemistry and Biology of ADP-Ribosylation-Dependent Signaling,” builds on an earlier five-year NIH grant awarded in 2020.
Zhang’s research sits at the intersection of chemistry and biology, where his lab develops new technologies and chemical tools to study how cells communicate and respond to stress. Understanding these processes could help scientists better understand diseases such as cancer and immune disorders and potentially develop new treatments.
During the first five years of the project, Zhang’s team created specialized chemical tools that allow scientists to track ADP-ribosylation — a molecular process cells use to control how proteins interact — inside living cells. The team also published multiple studies describing new ways to detect and manipulate the process.
“We developed several chemical probes that can detect and study ADP-ribosylation in cells,” Zhang says. “Using these tools, we were able to map how proteins interact through this process under both normal and disease conditions.”
These discoveries revealed an unexpected role for ADP-ribosylation in helping cells protect themselves from stress, offering new insight into how cells survive challenging conditions.
With the renewed NIH funding, Zhang and his team will now build more advanced tools to study this process in greater detail.
“This support will allow us to design new chemical tools that can study ADP-ribosylation with greater precision,” Zhang says. “Ultimately, we hope to better understand how this process influences key cellular events, including how immune cells become activated.”
Ultimately, insights from this work could help scientists design new therapies, including precision drugs and immunotherapies, for diseases such as cancer and immune disorders.