Profiles

Dr. Sun's lab has focused on the discovery, mechanistic study and identifying small molecule modulators of novel membrane receptors that play important roles in physiology and diseases. To achieve these goals, several new techniques have been developed by his lab. The first major discovery is the membrane receptor that mediates cellular uptake of vitamin A, a chemical essential for human survival. This receptor is expressed in blood-organ barriers and eluded identification for more than 30 years. Another discovery is the signaling receptor for the most potent endogenous inhibitor of angiogenesis. This receptor is highly specifically expressed in pathogenic blood vessels including tumor blood vessels. By developing a novel fluorescence-based technique, his team and collaborators identified potent chemical compounds that target this receptor to specifically kill tumor blood vessels to lead to effective tumor killing in vivo. In the past few years, his lab also developed a novel technique to screen for receptor-activating antibodies and successfully identified antibody drug candidates of this receptor after large-scale screening 10 billion human antibody clones in collaboration with scientists within and outside of UCLA.