Increasing the efficacy of prophylactic infused FIX in hemophilia B patients by manipulating its binding to collagen IV

Dr. Xuejie Chen is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Darrel Stafford at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining Dr. Stafford’s lab, she received her Ph.D. degree in Cell Biology from Beijing Normal University, P. R. China. In her JGP Fellowship project, Dr. Chen aims to study the contributions of extravascular factor IX (FIX) to blood coagulation and to search for FIX variants that could efficiently displace the endogenous dysfunctional FIX in hemophilia B patients. To achieve this goal, Dr. Chen will study the binding between FIX and the subendothelial basement membranes, mainly type IV collagen, and use the site-directed random mutagenesis library to screen for tighter binding FIX molecules. In doing so, she hopes to identify a FIX variant that can be used in hemophilia B patients for better coagulation therapies.