Publications by authors named "Lucas Zhongming Hu"

Article Synopsis
  • PMN-MDSCs are dysfunctional immune cells that hinder the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy, particularly by affecting the immune response in gastric cancer.
  • The study developed a fusion protein, TFF2-MSA, that acts as a partial agonist for the CXCR4 receptor, enhancing the effects of anti-PD-1 therapy to reduce tumor growth and improve survival in various gastric cancer models.
  • TFF2-MSA specifically reduces harmful PMN-MDSCs while keeping helpful neutrophils intact, which boosts the CD8 T cell-mediated anti-tumor response, contrasting with traditional CXCR4 antagonism that did not show similar benefits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The apicomplexan intracellular parasite Toxoplasma gondii is a major food borne pathogen that is highly prevalent in the global population. The majority of the T. gondii proteome remains uncharacterized and the organization of proteins into complexes is unclear.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Mechanism of Action (MoA) of a drug is generally represented as a small, non-tissue-specific repertoire of high-affinity binding targets. Yet, drug activity and polypharmacology are increasingly associated with a broad range of off-target and tissue-specific effector proteins. To address this challenge, we have leveraged a microfluidics-based Plate-Seq technology to survey drug perturbational profiles representing >700 FDA-approved and experimental oncology drugs, in cell lines selected as high-fidelity models of 23 aggressive tumor subtypes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 (hereafter: Synechocystis) is a model organism for studying photosynthesis, energy metabolism, and environmental stress. Although known as the first fully sequenced phototrophic organism, Synechocystis still has almost half of its proteome without functional annotations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Protein complexes are key macromolecular machines of the cell, but their description remains incomplete. We and others previously reported an experimental strategy for global characterization of native protein assemblies based on chromatographic fractionation of biological extracts coupled to precision mass spectrometry analysis (chromatographic fractionation-mass spectrometry, CF-MS), but the resulting data are challenging to process and interpret. Here, we describe EPIC (elution profile-based inference of complexes), a software toolkit for automated scoring of large-scale CF-MS data to define high-confidence multi-component macromolecules from diverse biological specimens.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF