Haifa Shen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Nanomedicine, Institute for Academic Medicine
Associate Member, Research Institute
Dr. Shen graduated from Zhejiang Medical University in 1985, and obtained his PhD degree in 1997 from The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Houston, Texas. He received his post-doctoral training at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland from 1997 to 2001. He joined the pharmaceutical industry thereafter, and worked on cancer drug development for 8 years. Dr. Shen came by to academia in early 2010 as an assistant professor in The University of Texas-Houston Medical School before joining Houston Methodist Research Institute in October, 2010.
Research in Dr. Shen’s laboratory is focused on development of novel therapeutics for cancer treatment. His laboratory has developed nanoporous silicon-based technology platforms for tumor tissue-specific delivery of cancer therapeutics, and has carried out studies in animal tumor models to evaluate therapeutic efficacy of nanodrugs including chemotherapeutic drugs, gene-silencing agents, and cancer vaccines. The leading compounds are currently undergoing cGMP production and GLP toxicity evaluation in preparation for human clinical trials.
He has published papers in Nature, Nature Genetics, Cell Reports, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Clinical Cancer Research, Clinical Chemistry, ACS Nano,Small, Biomaterials and other international journals.