Hu Zeng
Immunologist at Mayo Clinic who studies how mTOR signalling and cell metabolism shape T cells in autoimmunity, and who showed as a postdoc that regulatory T cells need mTORC1 to work
Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, and Department of Immunology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester · postdoc, Hongbo Chi lab, Department of Immunology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis (at the time of the study)
Regulatory T cells, or Tregs, are the immune system's peacekeepers: they stop other immune cells from attacking the body's own tissues. It had been thought that mTORC1, the growth-control complex, mainly works against Tregs, because rapamycin can help them expand. In ZEN2013, Hu Zeng, working in Hongbo Chi's lab at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, showed in mice that the opposite is also true. When Raptor, an essential part of mTORC1, was removed only from Tregs, the cells lost their suppressive function and the mice developed severe inflammatory disease. mTORC1 was needed to switch on cholesterol and lipid production in Tregs, which they use to keep up their suppressive programme. The study showed that a single signalling hub can both restrain and support the same cell type, depending on context.
Zeng now runs a research group in the Division of Rheumatology and the Department of Immunology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The lab studies T cell metabolism and signalling in autoimmune disease, including, in a 2026 study, the immune profile of inflammatory arthritis caused by cancer immunotherapy drugs, which looked driven mainly by T cells rather than autoantibodies.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | A | mTORC1 couples immune signals and metabolic programming to establish T(reg)-cell function ZEN2013 First author: showed in mice that regulatory T cells lacking mTORC1 lose their suppressive function, linking mTORC1 to Treg lipid metabolism. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Hu Zeng.
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- Hongbo Chi Showed that regulatory T cells need mTORC1 signalling to fuel their suppressive function, and studies how mTOR-driven metabolism steers T-cell fate
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