Lena Ho is an Assistant Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School and a joint principal investigator at A*STAR’s Institute of Medical Biology. She trained as an immunologist at Stanford University, where she studied the function and mechanism of chromatin remodeling proteins in the epigenetic regulation of embryonic, hematopoietic and cancer stem cells. During her postdoctoral training with Bruno Reversade, she discovered the paradigm that non-coding RNAs can encode peptides from small open reading frames (sORFs). In 2017, Ho established the Endogenous Peptides Lab, which utilizes a combinatorial platform to discover and characterize novel sORF-encoded peptides in the human genome. By understanding the biological prowess of these small peptides, the long term aim of Ho’s lab is to bring novel peptides from discovery to deployment in the combating cardiovascular and metabolic disorders.
