“The beauty of research is freedom,” says assistant professor of pharmacology and cancer biology Zhao Zhang, when asked what drove him to research transposons and circular DNA at Duke.
Though he is now a prominent researcher, Zhang reveals that he didn’t develop an interest in the research field until his senior year of college. It was when he was running his first PCR, a technique used to amplify small segments of DNA, nervously but excitedly waiting for the results, that he became “hooked” on research. He then pursued a master’s degree in China that further cemented his passion for biology.
He continued his education abroad and soon earned his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He then decided to forgo the traditional post-doctoral training period and instead established his research group at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where he stayed for nearly five years earning accolades like the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and the Larry Sandler Award from the Genetics Society of America.
At Carnegie, Zhang conducted research on how Drosophila, or fruit flies, can lay eggs while suppressing transposons. Jumping genes, or transposons, comprise around half of our genome and get their name from jumping from one genomic location to another. They can cause genomic instability and oncogenesis, or the formation of cancer.
One day by “pure serendipity,” the focus of their research was completely transformed when they learned that these transposons can form circular DNA. While trying to figure out why this occurred, Zhang discovered that there wasn’t much that researchers knew about circular DNA. He says it was like stumbling onto a “golden mountain” of unexplored research topics and decided to switch his research focus from germline biology to cancer biology.
This switch coincided with Zhang’s move to Duke, where he asks people to call him ZZ. Currently, his lab studies both transposons and circular DNA. One major goal of Zhang’s lab is to understand transposon-mediated immunity and use this to create cancer vaccines.
Another major focus of the ZZ lab is circular DNA, which can reintegrate into the genome. According to Zhang, circular DNA may also amplify cancer genes since “30% of cancer patients have circular DNA but for really aggressive cancers like glioblastoma (a brain cancer), 60% of patients have circular DNA.” His lab aims to use their research on circular DNA to develop drugs for cancer therapy.
His lab is currently waiting on results that have the potential to be instrumental in bringing new therapies for the treatment of cancer, including more aggressive types and those with lower rates of survival.
However, there is a possibility that the results will be unfavorable and he and his team will have to go back and tweak the system and re-optimize conditions before testing again.
“With science, you always learn something,” ZZ says. “Maybe it’s not what you wanted, but it is always a foundation to build the next stage of learning.”
