A Tribute to Dr. Guang Yang, Senior Scientist, Bing Center for WM
We offer this tribute to Dr. Guang Yang, who, after 13 years of service to the Bing Center (20 years at Dana-Farber), will be moving on to continue his career in the bio-pharmaceutical industry. Please join us in thanking him for his outstanding contributions in advancing our knowledge for the benefit of the WM community worldwide.
Dr. Guang Yang is a Senior Scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). He joined DFCI in 2001 following graduation from the Cancer Institute/Hospital of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) at Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) in Beijing, China. As a Research Associate in Dr. Benz's lab, he was focused on gene expression regulation studies and published several peer-reviewed papers in Blood, Molecular Cells, etc. In 2008, he joined the Bing Center for Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia (WM) as a Research Fellow and then promoted to an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. After the milestone discovery of MYD88-L265P somatic mutation in WM patients, his research has focused on mutated MYD88 signaling in B-cell malignancies. It demonstrated that MYD88-L265P triggers pro-survival NF-κB signaling in primary WM patient tumor cells (Treon et al. NEJM 2012.). This finding had a tremendous impact on the WM field by identifying MYD88-directed signaling as a novel therapeutic target for WM. He was the first to report Bruton Tyrosine Kinase (BTK) and Hematopoietic Cell Kinase (HCK) are downstream targets of mutated MYD88 signaling. These discoveries demonstrated that the pro-survival NF-kB signaling is driven by both BTK and IRAKs (Yang et al. Blood 2013), and HCK triggers pro-survival BTK, PI3K/AKT, and MAPK/ERK signaling (Yang et al. Blood 2016). The discovery of BTK as a downstream target of mutated MYD88 provided the scientific basis for the ibrutinib clinical trial (NCT01614821) in WM and subsequent fast-track, breakthrough designation, and accelerated approval by the U.S. FDA.
Read more: A Tribute to Dr. Guang Yang, Senior Scientist, Bing Center for WM
Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia Clinic
The Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia Clinic at the DFCI is devoted to the care of patients with Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia and related IgM disorders, including IgM MGUS, Myeloma and Neuropathies.
For more information on the WM Clinic at DFCI, please visit the DFCI Center for Hematologic-Oncology/Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia Clinic.
Basic Research
Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia (WM) is a distinct B-cell malignancythat results from the accumulation, predominantly in the bone marrow, of clonally related B type lymphocytes, lymphoplasmacytic cells and plasma cells which secrete a monoclonal IgM protein.1 This condition is considered to correspond to the lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma (LPL) as defined by the World Health Organization classification system.2 Most cases of LPL are WM, with less than 5% of cases made up of IgA, IgG and non-secreting LPL ...
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