Christina Lee Chung
Dermatologist specialising in skin disease of organ transplant recipients, and first author of a small randomised trial showing that topical rapamycin lowers a senescence marker in aging human skin
Montgomery Dermatology and Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, Pennsylvania (papers 2019–2026) · Department of Dermatology, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia (papers 2012–2019)
Christina Lee Chung is first author of the Atlas study CHU2019, with Christian Sell of Drexel University as senior author. Skin is a good place to test an anti-aging drug in people, because it can be seen, photographed and sampled with a small biopsy. In this exploratory randomised trial, older adults were randomised to rapamycin or placebo skin cream. Rapamycin lowered p16, a marker of senescent cells (old cells that have stopped dividing and send out inflammatory signals), and raised collagen VII, a protein that anchors the skin layers. Some participants' skin also looked better.
The trial was small: 36 people enrolled and 17 completed it. So it is early evidence that topical rapamycin can reduce a senescence marker in human skin, not proof that it slows skin aging. It is one of the few human studies in the Atlas in which rapamycin was applied to a tissue rather than given as a pill.
Chung's clinical research centres on skin disease in organ transplant recipients, who take drugs that suppress the immune system and develop skin cancers far more often than other people. At Drexel Chung led studies comparing skin disease after transplant across racial groups (2017) and on genital lesions in transplant recipients (2018). Later papers list Montgomery Dermatology and the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research in Pennsylvania, including expert consensus work on skin cancer screening and prevention after transplant (2019, 2021) and on topical treatment of precancerous skin lesions (2026).
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | H | Topical rapamycin reduces markers of senescence and aging in human skin: an exploratory, prospective, randomized trial CHU2019 First author: ran the randomised trial in which topical rapamycin lowered p16 and raised collagen VII in aging human skin. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Christina Lee Chung.
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- Christian Sell Studies the basic biology of ageing, especially how mTOR, rapamycin, cellular metabolism and senescence are connected.
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