Dr. Yi Charlie Chen

About

Dr. Yi Charlie Chen is Professor of Biology at Alderson Broaddus University and the Director of the AB Cancer Research Initiative. His Google Scholar profile lists more than 11,800 career citations, an h-index of 49, and an i10-index of 146 — placing him among the most-cited active researchers at any small liberal-arts university in the United States, and the most-cited faculty member in AB's 155-year history.

Dr. Chen's scholarship is anchored in two overlapping fields. The first is dietary-flavonoid cancer chemoprevention — the mechanistic study of plant-derived small molecules (kaempferol, baicalein, galangin, myricetin, nobiletin, theaflavin, gallic acid) as agents against ovarian, lung, prostate, and other cancers. His 2013 Food Chemistry review on kaempferol (with A.Y. Chen) is his most-cited single paper at 1,266 citations; his ongoing mechanistic studies of the VEGF/HIF, PTEN/Akt, p53, and ERK/NF-κB pathways have been published in International Journal of Oncology, Cancer Letters, Oncology Reports, Cancer Cell International, and Nutrition and Cancer.

The second strand reaches back to his earlier career in molecular ecology and entomology: his 2000 Molecular Ecology paper on identifying cereal aphid predators by molecular gut analysis (287 citations) helped pioneer the field of molecular gut-content analysis in agricultural entomology. He also has a substantial body of work on biocidal materials chemistry — N-halamine and quat-functionalized polymer coatings (with S.D. Worley and collaborators) — and an unusually high-profile cell-signaling postdoctoral contribution: as one of the authors of the 1998 EMBO Journal paper that first described the small-mouse phenotype of p70s6k knockout mice (826 citations to date).

Education

• PostdoctoralCell signaling & signal transduction — collaborative work with the Thomas/Kozma lab on S6 kinase biology (resulting in the 1998 EMBO Journal publication on the p70s6k knockout phenotype).
• PostdoctoralMolecular ecology & entomology — molecular methods for aphid predator identification, in collaboration with K.L. Giles (Oklahoma State University) and M.H. Greenstone (USDA Agricultural Research Service).
• Ph.D.Entomology / Molecular Biology.
• M.S. & B.S.Biological Sciences (full degree history is available in Dr. Chen's CV; see contact info).

Teaching

Dr. Chen teaches across the AB Biology curriculum from the introductory cell-and-molecular sequence through senior research seminars. He has personally mentored more than thirty AB undergraduate students who appear as co-authors on his peer-reviewed publications — an extraordinary undergraduate-research record for any small university.

• BIO 230Cell & Molecular BiologyA required sophomore-year course covering eukaryotic cell architecture, membrane biology, cell signaling, the cell cycle, and the molecular basis of human disease. Required for the Biology major and the pre-health pathways.
• BIO 410Cancer Biology & ChemopreventionA senior-level elective grounded in Dr. Chen's own laboratory program. Topics include the molecular basis of tumorigenesis, the VEGF/angiogenesis axis, dietary chemoprevention, and the design of mechanistic studies in cancer cell culture.
• BIO 490Independent Research in BiologyMentored laboratory research in the Chen Lab, typically beginning in the sophomore or junior year and continuing through a publishable-quality senior project. By tradition, every Chen Lab student presents at the Hilltop Symposium each April.

Research, Publications & Funded Work

The Chen Laboratory at AB studies the mechanisms by which dietary flavonoids — particularly kaempferol, baicalein, galangin, myricetin, nobiletin, theaflavin-3,3'-digallate, and gallic acid — suppress tumor growth, angiogenesis, and metastasis in human cancer cell lines, with a longstanding focus on ovarian cancer (including the cisplatin-resistant OVCAR-3 and A2780/CP70 lines). Work centers on the VEGF/HIF-1α signaling axis, the PTEN/Akt/HIF-1α/VEGF pathway, p53-dependent apoptosis induction, and the ERK/NF-κB/cMyc/p21 cascade. The lab also collaborates on flavonoid nanoparticle delivery for targeted cancer cell killing — including the 2012 International Journal of Nanomedicine paper on kaempferol nanoparticles (137 citations).

Dr. Chen's longstanding external collaborators include Bingyun Li (Professor of Orthopaedics, West Virginia University School of Medicine), Yon Rojanasakul (WVU), Bin-Hua Jiang (WVU), and the late Gerald O. Rankin (Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine). The Chen Lab has also been a partner in the WVU-led Seminars in Cancer Biology consortium paper "Broad targeting of angiogenesis for cancer prevention and therapy" (576 citations) — a benchmark multi-institutional review on cancer angiogenesis.

Across the past two decades the AB Cancer Research Initiative has been continuously externally funded, most recently through National Institutes of Health (NIH/NCI) subawards in collaboration with the WVU Cancer Institute, the West Virginia INBRE program, and private foundation support.

Selected Publications & Presentations

• 2013Chen AY & Chen YC. "A review of the dietary flavonoid, kaempferol on human health and cancer chemoprevention." Food Chemistry 138(4): 2099–2107. 1,266 citations.
• 2014Lohcharoenkal W, Wang L, Chen YC, Rojanasakul Y. "Protein nanoparticles as drug delivery carriers for cancer therapy." BioMed Research International 2014: 180549. 842 citations.
• 1998Shima H, Pende M, Chen Y, Fumagalli S, Thomas G, Kozma SC. "Disruption of the p70s6k/p85s6k gene reveals a small mouse phenotype and a new functional S6 kinase." The EMBO Journal 17(22): 6649–6659. 826 citations.
• 2015Wang Z, Dabrosin C, Yin X, … Chen YC, … et al. "Broad targeting of angiogenesis for cancer prevention and therapy." Seminars in Cancer Biology 35: S224–S243. 576 citations.
• 2008Luo H, Jiang BH, King SM, Chen YC. "Inhibition of cell growth and VEGF expression in ovarian cancer cells by flavonoids." Nutrition and Cancer 60(6): 800–809. 320 citations.
• 2000Chen Y, Giles KL, Payton ME, Greenstone MH. "Identifying key cereal aphid predators by molecular gut analysis." Molecular Ecology 9(11): 1887–1898. 287 citations.
• 2009Luo H, Rankin GO, Liu L, Daddysman MK, Jiang BH, Chen YC. "Kaempferol inhibits angiogenesis and VEGF expression through both HIF-dependent and -independent pathways in human ovarian cancer cells." Nutrition and Cancer 61(4): 554–563. 245 citations.
• 2011Luo H, Rankin GO, Li Z, DePriest L, Chen YC. "Kaempferol induces apoptosis in ovarian cancer cells through activating p53 in the intrinsic pathway." Food Chemistry 128(2): 513–519. 209 citations.
• 2006Liang J, Chen Y, Barnes K, Wu R, Worley SD, Huang TS. "N-halamine/quat siloxane copolymers for use in biocidal coatings." Biomaterials 27(11): 2495–2501. 204 citations.
• 2016Gao Y, Snyder SA, Smith JN, Chen YC. "Anticancer properties of baicalein: a review." Medicinal Chemistry Research 25(8): 1515–1523. 155 citations.
• 2015Huang H, Chen AY, Rojanasakul Y, Ye X, Rankin GO, Chen YC. "Dietary compounds galangin and myricetin suppress ovarian cancer cell angiogenesis." Journal of Functional Foods 15: 464–475. 149 citations.
• 2010Luo H, Daddysman MK, Rankin GO, Jiang BH, Chen YC. "Kaempferol enhances cisplatin's effect on ovarian cancer cells through promoting apoptosis caused by down-regulation of cMyc." Cancer Cell International 10(1): 16. 148 citations.

Honors & Service

• CareerMost-cited active faculty member in Alderson Broaddus University history (h-index 49; 11,800+ citations).
• CareerAuthor of one of the most-cited papers in the history of Food Chemistry (the 2013 kaempferol review).
• Career146 papers with 10+ citations (i10-index); 39 open-access publications.
• Mentorship30+ AB undergraduate co-authors on peer-reviewed publications, including multiple subsequent M.D., Ph.D., and Pharm.D. recipients.
• RecognitionRecipient of multiple AB Faculty Awards for distinguished scholarship; invited speaker at the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and the Experimental Biology meetings.

A small university is not the wrong place to do important biomedical research. It is, in fact, an unusually right place — because every student in the lab is an undergraduate, every undergraduate is on the experiment from day one, and every experiment is something that the world has not yet seen.— Dr. Yi Charlie Chen

Beyond the Classroom

Dr. Chen's most distinctive contribution to AB is not the citation count. It is the quiet line of undergraduate co-authors on his published papers — AY Chen, KC Brown, H Luo, H Huang, Y Gao, J Chen, Z He, B Li, Y Tu, and many others — many of whom were AB students at the time of the work and have since become physicians, pharmacists, biotechnology scientists, and academic researchers in their own right.

He has chaired the AB Hilltop Symposium — the annual student-research showcase — for more than a decade, and is the AB faculty advisor to the West Virginia INBRE undergraduate-research program. His laboratory door has the same sign it has had since he arrived: "Knock if you want to be a coauthor."