Our Science – Tan Website

Wei Tan, M.D., Ph.D.

Laboratory of Experimental Immunology Human Genetics Section Staff Scientist (Contr) National Cancer Institute at Frederick Building 560, Room 21-31 Frederick, MD 21702-1201 Phone:   301-846-5878 Fax:   301-846-1673 E-Mail:   TANW@NCIFCRF.GOV

Biography

Dr. Wei Tan graduated from Beijing Medical School in China in 1982. After graduation he worked at the National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products, China, where he got a Master's Degree in virus biochemistry and was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Hepatitis Vaccine in 1988. In 1996 Dr. Tan got both a Licentiate degree and a Ph.D. degree in virology at the Microbiology and Tumorbiology Center, Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Dr. Tan did his initial postdoctoral study in the Gene Therapy and Molecular Virology Group at the John P. Robarts Research Institute, Canada. In 1998 Dr. Tan started to work as a research fellow in the Human Retrovirus Pathogenesis Section at the National Cancer Institute, Frederick, Maryland. In 2004 Dr. Tan accepted a scientist position and worked with Dr. Michael Dean and Dr. Bert Gold ever since.

Research

Our research interest focuses on human psychiatric mental disorders and cancers. We are particularly interested in searching for schizophrenia susceptibility genes. Schizophrenia (SZ) is a life-long, devastating mental disorder affecting approximately 1% of the world's population. However, there is currently no cure for the disease. By linkage analyses and association studies, several candidate SZ susceptibility genes have been identified such as neuregulin 1 (nrg1), dysbindin 1, disc1, and erbB4. We have focused our initial attention on human nrg1 gene because its association with SZ has been replicated in multiple studies in different ethnic populations in the world. To date, more than 15 splice variants of nrg1 gene have been identified, and 6 types of the NRG1 protein isoforms have been proposed. We want to study whether different splice variants of nrg1 gene are associated with SZ. And we want to investigate the molecular mechanism underlying the association of causal variants with the disease.

Dr. Amanda Law and Dr. Daniel Weinberger, our collaborators at the NIH, found an elevated expression of the type IV transcripts of nrg1 gene in the brains of patients with SZ, suggesting that SZ is associated with altered expression of the type IV transcripts. In order to study the function of the NRG1, type IV protein, we need a full-length sequence of the type IV transcript. We have successfully isolated several novel full-length type IV transcripts from human brain. We found that expression of the type IV transcript is brain-specific. Interestingly, expression of the type IV transcripts is about 4 times higher in the fetal brain than that in the adult brain, suggesting that the type IV isoforms may play an important role in early development of human brain. We also mapped a functional promoter for the type IV transcript within a 1.5-kb DNA fragment. We have for the first time demonstrated that a functional promoter SNP variant in the nrg1 gene contributes to the elevated expression of type IV transcripts, and that this SNP variant is associated with an increased risk of SZ. We propose that altered expression of splice variants is a potential molecular mechanism underlying the genetic association of nrg1 gene with SZ. The function and subcellular localization of type IV protein isoform will be examined in cell culture system and in knockout mice.

This page was last updated on 1/26/2009.