Yong Lu, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Immunology in Medicine at Houston Methodist. Dr. Yong Lu joined Houston Methodist Academic Institute in November 2021 with the support of a  CPRIT Recruitment of Rising Stars award..

Prior to joining Houston Methodist, Dr. Lu was a co-leader of Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center for Signaling and Biotechnology (SBT) program. During 2019-2021, he was a member of NCI's cell-based immunotherapy network to: (A) provide NCI with advice on the research gaps in cancer adoptive cell therapy; (B) advise the NCI on future directions of cancer adoptive cell therapy. Dr. Lu's work focuses on translational T cell-based adoptive cell immunotherapy, targeting lung cancer, liver cancer, and other cancers. Dr. Lu investigates the reasons why adoptive cell therapies, immunotherapy in which tumor-specific T cells (e.g. CAR-T cells), are effective in combating leukemias and lymphomas but not in solid tumors. He is also interested in overcoming resistance of CAR-T cell therapy in multiple myeloma.

Since 2020, Dr. Lu has been awarded, as the PI, 5 R01s from NCI, 1 ACS research scholar grant, 3 cancer foundation grants, and numerous intramural and industry grants. In addition to the CPRIT Recruitment of Rising Stars award, Dr. Lu was the winner of New Drug Development Global Campaign in 2019 held by Daiichi Sankyo Co., Ltd. Recent representative corresponding-authored publications include: Cancer Cell 2022 (PMID: 36027915); Briefings in Bioinformatics 2022 (PMID: 35037026); Cancer Cell 2021 (PMID: 34678150); Nature Biomedical Engineering 2021 (PMID: 34725506); Nature Comm 2019 (PMID: 30914642); Cancer Cell 2018 (PMID: 29894691).