Research Interests:Tumor immunology, Cancer Biology, Wnt signal transduction.

Our laboratory is interested in tumor immunology and cancer biology. We study the mechanism in immune tolerance to tumor antigens in cancer models. We explores different ways to rescue the high avidity tumor antigen reactive T cells from negative selection and to modulate the function of regulatory T cells. We also study protein phosphatase as tumor suppressor in Wnt signaling.

Related Websites

• Graduate Program in Immunology

Recent Publications

1. Zheng X, Gao JX, Zhang H, Geiger TL, Liu Y, Zheng P. 2002. Clonal deletion of Simian Virus 40 large T antigen-specific T cells in the Transgenic Adenocarcinoma of Mouse Prostate mice: an important role for clonal deletion in shaping the repertoire of T cell specific for antigens over-expressed in solid tumors. J Immunol 169:4761-4769.
2. Yang T, McNally BA, Ferrone S, Liu Y, Zheng P. 2003. A single nucleotide deletion leads to rapid degradation of TAP-1 mRNA in a melanoma cell line. J.Biol.Chem.278:15291-15296.
3. Zheng X, Yin L, Liu Y, Zheng P. 2004. Expression of tissue-specific autoantigens in the hematopoietic cells leads to activation-induced cell death of autoreactive T cells in the secondary lymphoid organs. Eur. J. Immunol. 34:3126-34.
4. Yang T, Lapinski PE, Zhao HT, Zhou Q, Zhang H, Raghavan M, Liu Y, Zheng P. 2005. A rare TAP-1 polymorphism over-presented in HLA low colon cancer reveals functional significance of the signature domain in antigen processing. Clin Cancer Res. 11(10):3614-23.
5. Wang Y, Liu Y, Wu C, Zhang H, Zheng X, Zheng Z, Geiger TL, Nuovo GJ, Liu Y, Zheng P. Epm2a suppresses tumor growth in an immunocompromised host by inhibiting Wnt signaling. Cancer Cell. 2006 Sep;10(3):179-90.
6. Tao Zuo, Lizhong Wang, Carl Morrison, Xing Chang, Huiming Zhang, Michael Chan, Xingluo Liu, Yan Liu, Yin Wang, Richard Love, Tim M Huang, Tianyu Yang, Pan Zheng and Yang Liu. The X-linked gene Foxp3 is an important suppressor gene for breast cancer and repressor of Her-2/neu/ErbB2. Cell 129: 1275-1286.