Guocai Zhong, PhD

Assistant Professor, RNA Therapeutics Institute, Gene Therapy Center, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biotechnology

Email: Guocai.Zhong@umassmed.edu

Guocai received his PhD in Pathobiology in 2009, after a joint PhD training in Professor Hong Ling’s lab at Harbin Medical University and Professor Wenhui Li’s lab at the National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS), an HHMI-style research institute in Beijing, China. He then worked as a postdoc in the Li lab at NIBS and contributed to the discovery of sodium taurocholate cotransporting polypeptide (NTCP) as a receptor for HBV and HDV infection. This discovery has been acknowledged as a milestone breakthrough in HBV research in the past three decades and has been honored by the 2021 Baruch S. Blumberg Prize, the highest honor for hepatitis B research, and the 2022 Future Science Prize in the Life Science category. He then joined Professor Michael Farzan’s lab at the Scripps Research Institute Florida campus and initiated RNA switch engineering studies -- a new research direction in the Farzan lab. Here, he completed a series of first and corresponding-author studies that moved artificial RNA switches from working efficiently in vitro to now functioning with wide dynamic ranges in animals. In late 2019, Guocai started his independent group at Shenzhen Bay Laboratory and Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School in Shenzhen, China. In summer 2022, he joined the RNA Therapeutics Institute and Horae Gene Therapy Center at UMass Chan Medical School. Zhong Lab is focused on RNA switch engineering and regulatable gene therapy development.