Senior Investigator, Molecular Oncology Group, Lady Davis Institute
Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, McGill University
Dr. Rongtuan Lin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University, and a Project Director of the Molecular Oncology Group at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. Dr. Lin received his Ph.D. from Concordia University and completed post-doctoral training at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. Dr. Lin made important contributions in the fields of interferon signaling and innate antiviral immunity. He has a highly successful laboratory research program with 100 scientific publications, which have been cited more than 5,500 times. He was a recipient of a Chercheur-boursier senior and Junior 2 from Fonds de la recherche en sante du Quebec. In 1996 and 1998 he received the Milstein Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research.
Major Research Activities
Dr. Lin’s research objective is to characterize the transcriptional regulation of cytokine/chemokine gene expression and to understand the impact of viral infection on host transcription control, viral pathogenesis and oncogenesis. His research interests include: the mechanisms involved in TBK and IKK activation, the manipulation of the NF-κB and IFN pathways by HCV gene products during HCV replication, and the correlation of IRF-5 mutation with the cell growth regulation. His research, along with the work of many other scientists throughout the world over the past ten years, has identified key elements of the immune system that ‘sense’ and respond to incoming virus infection, specifically viral RNA. The other research project from Dr. Lin’s laboratory is to use small molecules of RNA that mimic influenza RNA to trigger a host immune response to defend against infection. He also wants to study how the NS1 protein of H5N1 can effectively evade the antiviral response and to understand the precise mechanism by which this occurs.
Recent Publications
Yang L., T. Zhao, P. Nakhaei, Q. Sun, J. Hiscott and R. Lin. 2009. Functional Analysis of A Dominant Negative Mutation of Interferon Regulatory Factor 5. PLoS One. 2009;4(5):e5500. Epub 2009 May 11.
Zhao, T., L. Yang, Q. Sun, M. Arguello, D. Ballard, J. Hiscott and R. Lin. 2007. The NEMO adaptor bridges the nuclear factor-kB and interferon regulatory factor signaling pathways. Nature Immunology 8(6):592-600.
Nakhaei, P., J. Hiscott and R. Lin. 2009. Sting-ing The Antiviral Pathway. Journal of Molecular Cell Biology (2009), 1–3.