Xiaodong Wang (born 1963) is a Chinese-American biochemist best known for his work with apoptosis, one of the ways through which cells kill themselves.
[4] After obtaining his PhD, Wang moved to the research group of Joseph L. Goldstein and Michael Stuart Brown, also at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) as a postdoctoral fellow.
In 2010, he ended all his positions in the United States and returned to China to take up the role of director of NIBS.
Brown and Goldstein were at the time studying the transcriptional regulation of the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor in response to cholesterol level.
SREBP bound to nuclear envelope and endoplasmic reticulum membranes, and had to be cleaved to be activated.
[15] Breakthrough came during Wang's one year at Emory University, when he developed a cell-free, in vitro system that replicated the activation of caspase 3 and the initiation of apoptosis.
[19] Apart from apoptosis, Wang also discovered the necroptosis pathway, which is the programmed form of necrosis and another way that a cell kills itself.