ABOUT

Charles (“Chaz”) Hong is Chair of Medicine and MSU Research Foundation Distinguished Professor in the College of Human Medicine. A chemical biologist, he discovered PI3-kinase’s role in vein formation, laying the foundation for treating venous malformation syndromes, and invented dorsomorphin, the first small-molecule inhibitor of bone morphogenetic protein signaling, transforming understanding of this pathway in development and disease. 

Dr. Hong earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from Yale University, completed a cardiology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

RESEARCH

The Hong lab’s interdisciplinary research spans both bed to bench-side, and bench to bed-side. For example, we are utilizing patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells to elucidate the role of centrosome reorganization in heart development and disease. Recently, the Hong lab identified GPR68, a proton-sensing G-protein-coupled receptor, as a key mediator of acidification-driven pro-tumorigenic signaling in cancer, where the acidic tumor microenvironment activates GPR68 to promote cancer cell survival and treatment resistance. Because inhibiting GPR68 induces ferroptosis, a novel iron-dependent cell death, selectively in cancer cells, the Hong lab is developing small molecule GPR68 inhibitors as future cancer therapeutics.