Lu lab focuses on the mechanisms of infiltration, survival and exhaustion of T cells in tumor microenvironment, aiming to 1) develop pharmacological intervention to enhance anti-cancer immunotherapies; 2) design novel tumor vaccines.

Dr. Lu started tumor immunology research in his PhD program when he took a collaborated project of developing innovative immunotherapies with Drs Yongjun Liu and Lixin Li from Seven & Eight Biopharma. Currently, the project has entered phase II clinical trial in US. During his postdoc training, one of Dr Lu’s work has been published as two research articles back-on-back in Cancer Cell, which discovers the mechanisms of responsiveness and non-responsiveness in anti-PD1 therapy against dMMR tumor and reveals the key role of tumor cells-intrinsic cGAS-STING pathway in the tumor-infiltrating of T cells. This work is highly evaluated by the scientific community, especially by Professors Andrés Cervantes (president of ESMO) and Alberto Bardelli ( president of EACR), and elected as “EACR TOP 10 Cancer Research Publications” in 2020.

Huang, Y.#, Lu, C.#, Wang, H., ... & Li, G. M. (2023). DNAJA2 deficiency activates cGAS-STING pathway via the induction of aberrant mitosis and chromosome instability. Nature Communications, 14(1):5246.

Cai, Y., Zhang, A., Lu, C.*. (2022). Precision intervention of cell type-specific targeting is required for future cancer immunotherapy. Medical Review, 2(6), 553-554.

Lu, C.#, Guan, J.#, Lu, S., Jin, Q., Rousseau, B., Lu, T., ... & Fu, Y. X. (2021). DNA sensing in mismatch repair-deficient tumor cells is essential for anti-tumor immunity. Cancer Cell, 39(1), 96-108. （This paper is elected as EACR’s Top 10 Cancer Research Publications in 2020; A highly cited paper in Web of Science.）

Guan, J.#, Lu, C.#, Jin, Q., Lu, H., Chen, X., Tian, L., ... & Li, G. M. (2021). MLH1 deficiency-triggered DNA hyperexcision by exonuclease 1 activates the cGAS-STING pathway. Cancer Cell, 39(1), 109-121. A highly cited paper in Web of Science.

Liu, L., Chen, J., Zhang, H., Ye, J., Moore, C., Lu, C., Fang, Y., Fu, Y. X., & Li, B. (2022). Concurrent delivery of immune checkpoint blockade modulates T cell dynamics to enhance neoantigen vaccine-generated antitumor immunity. Nature cancer, 3(4), 437–452.

Anli Zhang,Zhenhua Ren, Kuo-Fu Tseng, Xiaojuan Liu, Huiyu Li, Changzheng Lu, Yueqi Cai, John D. Minna, Yang-Xin Fu. (2021). Dual targeting of CTLA-4 and CD47 on Treg cells promotes immunity against solid tumors. Science Translational Medicine, 13(605), eabg8693.