Ren Sun Group

RESEARCH

Professor Ren Sun takes systems biology approaches to address critical questions in two areas: virology and immunology. His lab has integrated genomics, proteomics, structural biology, microfluidics, mathematical modeling, and deep learning to characterize biological processes at both population and single virus/ cell levels. For example, his team has developed a method that can generate functional maps of entire viral genomes at single nucleotide resolution. It lays the foundation for comprehensively defining virus-host interactions, and enables engineering virus for rational vaccine design. The approach was demonstrated with influenza virus in vitro and in vivo: when the immune-evasion functions were systematically identified and removed from the viral genome, the engineered viruses became more immunogenic than the wild type, but severely attenuated in vivo. Thereby, it can be a general rational approach to develop therapeutic or prophylactic vaccine for many pathogens.

Recently his team has been integrating synthetic biology and microfluidics to develop technology platforms to profile the adaptive immune responses (antibodies, B cells and T cells) in a high-throughput manner. At Westlake University, he will continue using systems approaches to investigate host adaptive immunity with high-throughput and quantitative measurement, incorporated with multi-omics data and deep learning. The long-term goal is to comprehensively define the host immunome thus developing novel vaccines and anti-cancer therapies.

Direction 1. Define the functions of viral genome at high resolution and develop new vaccines. Our goal is to develop and use systems biology approaches to comprehensive investigate the functions of viral genome and viral-host interactions of important human viruses (such as SARS-CoV-2, influenza A virus, HBV, tumor-associated herpesviruses, and HIV). The functional genomic maps will enable precision design of viral genomes to engineer novel vaccines.

Direction 2. Systematically profile adaptive immune responses post infection or vaccination. Our team is developing and using high-throughput technology platforms to map epitope-specific antibody, B cell and T cell responses, to systematically define the immunome of hosts post infection or vaccination. These technology platforms will be also applied to studies on cancers, auto-immune diseases and neuroimmunology.

Direction 3. Define protein structures and engineer protein binders for diagnosis and therapies. We have integrated in vitro evolution, protein structure characterization and mass spectrometry technologies to engineer proteins and to understand the principles of protein-protein interactions. Our goal is to generate or further improve protein binders for disease diagnosis and therapies.