Wenjun Fan
Cancer biologist in Marikki Laiho's lab at Johns Hopkins who studies ribosome production as a weak point of cancer cells, and who showed how mTOR inhibition helps cells survive when ribosomes run short
Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Marikki Laiho lab, papers 2022–2026)
Ribosomes are the machines that build every protein in the cell, and cancer cells need huge numbers of them. Drugs that block ribosome production are being tested against cancer. In the Atlas study FAN2026 in Genes & Development, Wenjun Fan, first author in Marikki Laiho's lab, asked what happens to mTOR signalling when ribosome production fails. Turning mTORC1 off did not restore ribosome production. Instead it shifted the few ribosomes left away from 5'TOP mRNAs, a family of messages that normally take up a large share of ribosomes, and toward messages the cell needs to survive. The authors call this translational fitness. The work was done in cancer cells.
All of Fan's papers with Laiho in PubMed come from the Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences at Johns Hopkins. As first author in 2022, Fan used whole-genome data from 2,504 people in the 1000 Genomes Project to show that human ribosomal RNA genes vary much more between people than expected. A 2025 first-author paper in Cell Chemical Biology found that cancer cells with faulty RPL22, a ribosomal protein, are especially sensitive to drugs that block RNA polymerase I, the enzyme that makes ribosomal RNA, and that RPL22 also controls how many other messages are spliced. The Atlas paper also lists the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | M | mTOR inactivation governs adaptive survival to ribosome biogenesis deficiency FAN2026 First author: showed in cancer cells that mTORC1 inhibition redirects scarce ribosomes from 5'TOP mRNAs to survival transcripts when ribosome production fails. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 2
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Wenjun Fan.
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- Marikki Laiho Studies DNA damage, the nucleolar stress response and how RNA polymerase I (which makes ribosomal RNA) can be targeted in cancer.
- Rachel Green Biochemist who studies how the ribosome works and how cells detect and rescue stalled or colliding ribosomes, including links to the integrated stress response
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