The Tan Lab focuses on drugging the cancer cell fate, where advanced chemical biology methods are developed and applied to identify chemical probes targeting a class of oncogenes called lineage transcription factors. The malfunctioning of these lineage factors pushes normal cells toward a cancer cell fate. However, the majority of them remain undruggable. Understanding the underlying disease mechanisms of these factors is crucial for downstream cancer therapeutic development.

 

The lab aims to (1) democratize drug discovery by developing low cost, straightforward, and high-throughput cell-based physical biochemical assays for detecting endogenous protein-small molecule interactions and endogenous RNA perturbations by small molecules, useful for discovering new drugs targeting transcription factors and other disease-related proteins, and (2) develop new multi-omics methods to identify druggable RNA-dependent protein-protein interactions in cancer.