Peng Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine. Before joining the faculty at TSRI, Peng was an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and the Scientific Director of the Chemical Biology Core Facility at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.
Peng Wu received his doctorate from the Scripps Research Institute in 2005 under the guidance of Professor K. Barry Sharpless. From September 2004 to early 2005, he was a visiting student in the laboratory of Professor Craig J. Hawker at IBM Almaden Research Center and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His graduate studies, in collaboration with the Hawker lab, demonstrated for the first time the powerful utilization of click chemistry in the preparation of well-defined macromolecules and nanostructured materials.
From August 2005 to September 2008, Peng was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Professor Carolyn R. Bertozzi at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he combined his interests in bioorthogonal chemistry and biotechnology by developing a method for site-specific modification of monoclonal antibodies using a genetically-encoded aldehyde tag.
The research in the Wu laboratory integrates synthetic chemistry with glycobiology to explore the relevance of protein glycosylation in human disease and host-symbiont interactions. The major goal of the laboratory is to develop chemical biology platforms to image and characterize the glycome in tumors and in the immune system. The laboratory is also interested in chemical tools that enable selectively enrichment of glycoproteins in leukocytes for their molecular identification and functional studies. These new tools will facilitate the discovery of new biomarkers for human disease, and assist in the development of clinical diagnostics and therapeutics.
