Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School; Assistant in Chemistry, Massachusetts General Hospital
Changning Wang, Ph.D., has a unique and broad background in molecular imaging, medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutical sciences and neuroscience. After finishing his doctoral studies, he joined Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging as a research fellow and later as a trainee in the Harvard/MGH Nuclear Medicine Training Program, to expand his research skills in clinical imaging research. He is now an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. In the past few years, he has developed [11C]Martinostat as a robustly brain penetrant imaging agent with selectivity for class I HDACs. [11C]Martinostat is the first and only-to-date PET imaging probe for epigenetic research. He designed this probe in only a half year, an extremely short time. The exploratory IND for [11C]Martinostat was approved by the FDA for first-in-human trials and is the first tool of its kind available to characterize HDAC expression in the living human brain. Dr. Wang is leading the project of [11C]Martinostat clinical imaging in several patient groups. He is also working on developing new PET imaging probes targeting other epigenetic enzymes and using these tools for new drug discovery.
