Ge-Xin

Xin (Alex) Ge, PhD

  • Professor, IMM-Texas Therapeutics Institute
  • Kay & Ben Fortson Distinguished Chair in Neurodegenerative Disease Research
  • Adjunct Faculty, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, McGovern Medical School
 
Contact
Xin (Alex) Ge, PhD
713-500-2403

Administrative Coordinator
Chunmei (Vita) Liu
713-500-2477

Biography

Xin Ge, PhD, is a Professor of Molecular Medicine, and the Kay and Ben Fortson Distinguished Chair in Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He is a regular faculty member at the MD Anderson-UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Prior to joining UTHealth Houston, he was Assistant and Associate Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Riverside in 2011-2021.

Dr. Ge’s research focuses on developing biologics, such as monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), T-cell receptors (TCRs) and therapeutic enzymes. His laboratory is committed to inventing enabling technologies that facilitate biologics discovery and engineering, which are important but difficult or even impossible with current methods. Bypassing the limits associated with what nature offers, Dr. Ge and his team apply engineering strategies and streamline a set of in vitro approaches including synthetic library construction, structure-aided design, mammalian cell display, functional selection, and repertoire deep sequencing. Combinations of these novel approaches provide a powerful means for generation and optimization highly potent biologics relevant to disease diagnosis and treatment.

Professional Highlights

  • Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (R35), NIGMS, 2021
  • Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER), NSF, 2015
  • Postdoctoral Fellowship, NSERC, 2008
  • Ad hoc reviewer for 7 NIH study sections, 7 NSF review panels, and 5 foreign national agencies
  • Graduated 7 PhD and 7 MS; and supervised 11 postdocs and 5 research scientists

Education

Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2008-2011
University of Texas at Austin
Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2008
McMaster University
Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, 2008
McMaster University
M.S. Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, 2003
Tsinghua University
B.S. Chemical Engineering, 2000
Tsinghua University

Areas of Interest

Research Interests

Protease Inhibitory mAbs. Proteases are important drug targets, but their compound inhibitors largely failed due to lack of specificity while conventional mAb technologies are incompetent for the isolation of inhibitors. To address these issues, my laboratory has been developing a series of novel technologies, notably camelid-inspired convex paratope human antibody library design and functional selection/screening. Applying these engineering strategies, panels of potent and highly specific mAbs have been facilely discovered, to inhibit numerous proteases of biomedical importance. Our protease inhibitory mAbs have exhibited significant therapeutic efficacy in animal models of melanoma, breast cancer, neuropathic pain, obesity, dietetics, SARS-CoV-2, stroke, and diabetic neuropath. Several US/WO patents have been granted and many our mAbs are licensed to pharmaceutical companies for further development.

Directed Evolution in Mammalian Cells. Construction of combinatorial libraries in mammalian cells offers unique opportunities for therapeutic development that microbial platforms cannot provide. Apart from commonly used lentivirus or CRISPR/Cas9, we focus on recombinase-mediated transgene integration systems and develop a series of optimizations to achieve desired criteria of library construction in mammalian cells – transgene stability, monoclonality, large-diversity, and high-fidelity. Applying our novel approaches, Fc mutants were engineered with enhanced affinity and selectivity for individual FcγRs and improved cytotoxic potency. We also achieved rapid discovery of TCR-like CARs that effectively elicit potent and persistent T cell responses toward cancer associated antigens without cross-reactivities. This platform technology is widely applicable for the development of a variety of immunotherapy modalities including CAR-T, TCR-T, and T cell engagers against cancer, infections and autoimmune diseases.

https://med.uth.edu/imm/biopharmaceutical-discovery/

Publications

Selected publications (#equal contribution, *corresponding author)