Xiang Peng

Biography

Andy Peng Xiang graduated from the Department of Biology of the Anhui University in 1994. From 1994 to 1999 he studied for the master and PhD program in West China University of Medical Sciences. After getting his doctorate, he obtained postdoctoral training from 1999 to at the Department of Pathophysiology of Sun Yat-sen University. From 2001 to 2004 he worked as a research associate at the Department of Human Genetics of University of Chicago/ Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In 2004, he came back to China to establish Center for stem cell biology and tissue engineering and became the full professor in 2007. His research focused on the molecular mechanisms of stem cell self renewal and differentiation. He established the nestin knockout mice model and studied the important role of nestin on neural stem cell survival and tissue regeneration. He also succeeded in deriving ES cells from Apodemus and identified Apodemus ES cells could fully integrate with the inner cell mass of mouse blastocysts to produce viable chimeras despite the considerable evolutionary distance separating these two species, which provided a proof of principle for the feasibility of differentiating pluripotent stem cells into a wide range of cell types—and perhaps even complex tissues—by allowing them to develop in vivo in an evolutionarily divergent host. He is also very interested in the immunomodulatory properties of mesenchymal stem cells and its clinical translation. So far, he has obtained 7 grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China, 3 grants from National Basic Research Program of China (973). Prof. Xiang has published more than 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, such as Hum Mol Genet, Stem Cells, Biomaterials, Mol Cell, Cell Res, etc.

Research Interest

Stem cell biology and Tissue engineering