Zhenjun has an ongoing interest on interaction amongst MHC, CD3 and TCR. He has co-authored significant publications in Nature, Nature Immunology, JEM and PNAS.
Chen once worked on MHC polymorphism, antigen presentation and diseases. He had generated a few transgenic mouse lines for Celiac Disease model. He also established an in vitro T cell cellular assay for measuring T cells activation, which involving reconstitution of specific MHC molecules/their mutants in different APC cells and reconstitution of TCR genes/their mutants in Jurkat/SKW3 cells for human and BW58 cells for mouse. This in vitro T cell cellular assay is currently used by many labs around the world for its simplicity and reliability.
CI Chen's work currently focuses on the recently discovered Mucosal Associated Invariant T (MAIT) cells. He has established animal models with infectious bacteria and fungi for assaying MAIT cell activation, function and vaccination. He is actively exploring potential immune-therapies based on MAIT cells. He is co-supervising a junior postdoc, one PhD and two Masters students. He contributed to the key breakthroughs of MAIT antigen discovery (Nature 2012, 2014) and development of MR1 tetramers to enable specific detection of MAIT cells (JEM 2013), which in turn unravelled the biology of MAIT cells (NI 2x2016, 2017; 2x Nature Comms 2017, 2018; JEM 201, 2x 2015).