Hongyu Chen
@HongyuChenChem
Phd student @ MIT Chemistry Organic Chemist (still)
Synthesizing RNA can be as fun as LEGO puzzles! This work is co-led by my incredible colleagues @LDangliang and @AbhiAditham . Huge thanks to my supervisor @WangXiaoLab for such amazing ideas. We are also grateful for the editor, reviewers, and all collaborators along the way.
Chemical and topological design of multicapped mRNA and capped circular RNA to augment translation go.nature.com/47EXbfq
Checkout this amazing work led by Grace for highly versatile and efficient all-RNA based gene insertion techniques at kilobases length! Years of hard work paid off. I’m so proud to be involved and find new use of our RNA modification strategy (particularly on a non-coding RNA).
Can we use RNA to insert kilobases of DNA into the human genome, opening up a new way to engineer cells or treat disease? Excited to share our latest work turning a retrotransposon (a “jumping gene” with an RNA intermediate) from songbirds into a genome editing tool. 🧵 (1/7)
covercovercovercovercovercovercovercovercovercovercover this is terrifically exciting (Also please dw, the central dogma is still very much intact, this is just a bit of a funky spin on it)
The central dogma of molecular biology states that genetic information flows from DNA and RNA to protein, with reverse transcription converting RNA to DNA. In the pursuit of understanding how bacteria defend themselves from viral infection, two groups have found alternative…
Our latest work is on the cover of @Nature (June 26, 2025)! Even more special: the stunning illustration was hand-drawn by first author Hao Sheng — a true scientist-artist.
I’m beyond thrilled to share that I will be joining the @MIT Department of Biological Engineering @MITdeptofBE as an Assistant Professor in January 2026! I will also be an intramural member of the legendary Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT @kochinstitute
It was super fun working on Evo 2, a DNA language model trained on genomes across the tree of life! Check out the preprint: arcinstitute.org/manuscripts/Ev… A small 🧵 highlighting some mechanistic interpretability work on Evo 2 (Fig. 4) we did in collaboration with @GoodfireAI 🔥🔥🔥
Check out this beautiful work from Prof Abe for construction of capped circular mRNA🤩 with chemo-enzymatic approach for RNA synthesis. Congratulations to the team!
I am happy to share the concept of internal cap-initiated translation, which was published in Nature Biotech. I appreciate the amazing effort from lab members. nature.com/articles/s4158…
Check out @cpnoct cool new study on the role of CCK neurons in the DRN for regulating satiation, out today @CellCellPress ! Excited to have contributed to this work.
Thrilled to share the latest work out of my lab at @CellCellPress on neuropeptidergic neurons in the dorsal raphe that regulate satiation. (cell.com/cell/fulltext/…). Led by Srikanth Chowdhury, Nachi Kamatkar, and Wendy Wang (from Xiao Wang's lab). Congrats to an incredible team!
LNP/mRNA therapeutics and AAV-based approaches require cell-level precision to achieve success without significant toxicity to other cells. To enable this, we now introduce SCP-Nano🤗 in @NatureBiotech: an AI-based technology for precision nanotechnology. nature.com/articles/s4158…
Excited to share FuseMap, a contextual AI framework that bridges gene expression, spatial contexts & various gene panels. We integrated 7 spatial atlases and gained a fundamental understanding of the mouse brain. Thanks to @WangXiaoLab @ganoopyliujia for great mentorship!
Towards a universal spatial molecular atlas of the mouse brain biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_genomic
Our paper on continuous mutagenesis in living cells using HACE is now out in @ScienceMagazine! We now demonstrate that HACE continuously generates mutations over a 10-day period and enables targeting using dCas9 without introducing DNA nicks. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Doing good science is 90% finding a science buddy to constantly talk to about the project.
I see some discussion of this paper going around: nature.com/articles/s4159… It was preprinted a while ago but since that time I have had an opportunity to talk to some plasma cells researchers and it is apparent that there is a lot of important nuance being missed 🧵
(1/3) This important collab with @WangXiaoLab, out now in @NatureBiotech, promises to expand the potential of mRNA-based therapies. The paper describes a method for systematic chemical modification and screening of synthetic #mRNAs to optimize their translation efficiency.
Chapter 2 of branched RNA: chemically modified branched cap for multi-capped mRNA and capped circular RNA (QRNA)--the cellular translation machinery is surprisingly tolerant of unnatural structures! Beyond enhanced performance, the mechanism is intriguing: rdcu.be/dUQKX
Thrilled to announce that my back-to-back co-first author papers are out today in @Nature! We present a long-term clinical study in patients and a preclinical study in mice, demonstrating the unexpected role of type-2 immunity in sustaining durable CAR T and ICB immunotherapies!
A single diiron #enzyme catalyses the oxidative rearrangement of tryptophan to indole nitrile by @sanjoyadak90, @naike_y, Calderone, Duan, Lubeck, Schäfer, @AprilLukowski, @houk1000, Pandelia, @Drennan_Lab, & @BradMoore_SIO @moorelabsio in @NatureChemistry nature.com/articles/s4155…
Thank you Mirco!
Happy to have contributed to this intelligent next step in building better mRNAs for therapeutic application! Check it out: nature.com/articles/s4158…
Also thanks so much for the news & view written by Bei Chen and Tao Pan commenting on this work and our previous multi-tail constructs rdcu.be/dURbC
mRNA with multiple caps may enable treatments that last longer, require smaller doses and cause fewer side effects. These multi-capped mRNAs are the result of a new framework by Broad scientists to systematically modify mRNA for treating various conditions broad.io/LEGO-mRNA