Kailong Li

Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics

Contact Information

Peking University Health Science Center, Xueyuan Road 38, Haidian District, Beijing

Email: kailongli@bjmu.edu.cn

Personal Profile

Dr. Kailong Li received his B.S. in Life Sciences fromWuhan University and Ph.D.in Pathology and Pathophysiologyat Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, where he studied themechanisms that control pancreatic cancer metastasis under the mentorship of Dr. Limin Li. InSeptember 2015, hejoined Dr.Jian Xu's laboratory in Children's Research Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center as apostdoctoral fellowand focused onthe functional and molecular studies of non-coding regulatory DNA elements,particularly transcriptional enhancers, in blood stem cell differentiation and cancers. His studies with Dr. Jian Xu developed the CRISPR epigenetic editing toolsets, enCRISPRa and enCRISPRifor interrogation of enhancer function and an integrative framework to identify and functionally dissect non-coding regulatory variants in human diseases including cancer.

In 2021, Dr. Li joined the faculty of School of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking University. Dr. Li is the recipient of the CPRITtraininggrant (2018, 2019), the Travel Award for Best Postdoc Poster, Cancer Biology Retreat (2019) and the Collaborator of the Year Award, CRI (2020). For more details, welcome to check him out on the lab website: https://www.x-mol.com/groups/kailong_li_lab

Research of Focus

Precise genetic and epigenetic spatiotemporal regulation of gene expression is critical to control cellfate. Dysregulationof the related pathways is detrimental to normaldevelopment, which can further result indevastatingdiseases. It’s becoming increasingly clear that gene regulation is not a linear one-to-one process, but rather occurs in the context of complex networks of interactions between multiple genes, regulatory elements, transcription factors and even 3D genome organization, so pinpointing the disease-causing genetic and epigeneticmechanisms stillremains challenging.

Through a combination ofhuman patient samples, genomeand epigenome editing toolkit, disease modeling, single cell sequencing and bioinformatics, the Li Lab will investigatethe geneticand epigeneticetiology that control cancer and other genetic disorders, with the ultimate goal to uncover novel therapeutic targetsand precision treatments.

Broadly speaking, we’re working on the following projects:

1. The role of non-coding variants within regulatory elements in cancer progression and metastasis

2. The role of 3D genome organization in development and cancer

3. The epigenome editing potential for treating rare genetic diseases