Yingxin Ren
Gastric cancer researcher in Yanfeng Hu's surgical group at Nanfang Hospital who studies how tumour bacteria and metabolism shape resistance to immunotherapy
Department of General Surgery and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Precision Medicine for Gastrointestinal Tumor, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University (papers 2023–2026)
Yingxin Ren is first author of the Atlas study REN2026, with Yanfeng Hu as senior author. Immune checkpoint drugs that block PD-1 release a brake on T cells so they can attack tumours, but many gastric cancers do not respond. The team linked part of this resistance to bacteria living inside the tumour. Streptococcus anginosus was associated with kynurenic acid, a metabolite that raised levels of the integrin ITGA2 in cancer cells.
ITGA2 then held back an mTOR-dependent cascade, which kept cathepsin V (CTSV) expression high and weakened the killing activity of CD8 T cells. In this setting lower mTOR activity sits on the side of immune escape, a reminder that the effect of mTOR depends on cell type and context.
Ren's other papers come from the same group and the Guangdong key laboratory for gastrointestinal tumours: tumour bacteria and their vesicles that improve PD-1 therapy (2026), gut bacteria that tune CD8 T cell immunity through butyrate (2024), an enzyme that protects gastric cancer stem cells from ferroptosis through a cholesterol and mTOR pathway (2024), and imaging probes for lymph nodes and peritoneal spread (2025, 2026).
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | A | Streptococcus anginosus-associated kynurenic acid drives PD-1 blockade resistance through an ITGA2-mTOR-CTSV axis in gastric cancer. REN2026 First author: showed that tumour-associated kynurenic acid drives PD-1 blockade resistance in gastric cancer through an ITGA2-mTOR-CTSV axis that suppresses CD8 T cells. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 2
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Yingxin Ren.
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- Jiaqiang Jiang Member of the Nanfang Hospital gastric-cancer surgery team that traced how a tumor-enriched gut bacterium rewires CD8+ T cells through an mTOR-linked checkpoint to blunt anti-PD-1 therapy.
- Xiang Yu Member of Yanfeng Hu's gastric-cancer lab who contributed to a study showing how a microbiota-linked metabolite, kynurenic acid, drives resistance to PD-1 blockade
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