Dr. Kai-Fu Tang is a professor at the Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology on Infectious Diseases, Ministry of Education, Chongqing Medical University. He was the first person to report the involvement of RNAi machinery in DNA damage repair. In 2008, he reported that knockdown of Dicer, a key component of the RNA interference pathway, induced DNA damage (Tang et al, J Cell Biol). This finding opened up a new research direction in the RNAi field. Moreover, he found that decreased Dicer expression plays a central role in the development of unresolved chronic inflammation and carcinogenesis. Recently, Dr. Tang's group identified a class of ∼20–40 bp small cytosolic dsDNA (scDNA) molecules. Functional analysis revealed that scDNA prevents cGAS activation by competing with long dsDNA for binding to cGAS and by inducing autophagic degradation of long dsDNA and STING (Liu et al, Cell Rep, 2023). Dr. Tang has published more than 40 papers in international journals such as J Cell Biol, Genome Biol, Nucleic Acids Res, Nat Commun, Oncogene, Cell Rep, Autophagy, Theranostics, Pharmacol Res, Cell Death Dis, Carcinogenesis, and J Biol Chem.
