Xi Chen

Full Professor

Harbin Institute of Technology; Conjubody Biotek Ltd.

Short Biography

Prof. Dr. Xi Chen is a professor of biotechnology and chemical biology at The HIT Center for Life Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), and founder of Conjubody Biotek Ltd., a company committed to developing innovative nanobody technologies and proximity-inducing modalities for both basic research and drug discovery. He earned his B.Sc. in Chemistry from Sichuan University, an M.Sc. from the National University of Singapore, and a Ph.D. in Protein Chemistry from Ulm University (Germany) in 2012. He continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, later joining the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Since 2019, Prof. Chen has led a multidisciplinary research lab at HIT, where his work focuses on (i) nanobody-based targeted protein degradation, (ii) chemo-optogenetics and chemically induced proximity, and (iii) the study of mitotic spindle assembly in cancer.

Presentation Topic: Nanobody-Based Platforms for Targeted Degradation of Disease-Driving Proteins

• Nanobody-based targeted protein degradation offers distinct advantages in addressing disease-associated proteins that are unstructured or lack defined ligand-binding pockets.
• Autophagy-targeting nanobody chimera (ATNC) facilitates degradation of the undruggable tumor marker human epididymis protein 4 (HE4), leading to suppressed ovarian cancer cell proliferation and migration.
• Proteolysis-targeting nanobody conjugate (PROTNC) promotes degradation of the oncogenic protein TPX2, resulting in mitotic arrest and inhibition of cancer cell growth.
• Cell-penetrating peptide (CPP)-nanobody chimera, termed “Endobody”, directly induces selective degradation of membrane proteins associated with cancer through ELS pathway.