During her Ph.D. period, Dr. Zhang Lei was mainly engaged in the research and application of non-coding RNA in tumorigenesis and development, including studying the activity and specificity of siRNA and miRNA through in vitro screening platform, such as targeting breast cancer estrogen receptor miRNA function, And explore non-coding RNA as a marker for early diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer. During her Ph.D., she published two first-author articles and participated in obtaining a Chinese authorized patent. During her postdoctoral period, Dr. Zhang Lei was mainly engaged in a series of studies on the analysis of colorectal cancer tumor microenvironment, immunotherapy response and resistance mechanism with single-cell omics technology. So far, Dr. Zhang Lei has published more than 10 papers in top professional journals such as "Nature", "Cell", "Nature Medicine", "Cancer Immunology Research", "Cell Research", "Genome Biology", including " 5 first or co-first author articles such as Nature" and "Cell".

Dr. Zhang Lei’s main scientific contributions in the field of single cell omics and tumor immunity include (1) the first systematic analysis of the transcriptome and T cell receptor (TCR) of colorectal cancer infiltrating T cells at the single cell level Repertoire characteristics; (2) For the first time, analyze the differences in T cell subtypes of colorectal cancer patients with unstable and stable genomic microsatellites from the single-cell level, and find the potential impact on the differences in the response of colorectal cancer patients to PD-1 blockers A new type of helper T cell subset (BHLHE40+ Th1-like T cells) (this major discovery has been widely recognized and cited by journals such as Nature, Cell, Nature Medicine and Nature Reviews); (3) Co-developed integration The STARTRAC bioinformatics method of single-cell transcriptome and TCR comprehensively characterizes the dynamic relationship between patients' T cells (this method has achieved the top ten progress in China's bioinformatics in 2018); (4) The first time for the colorectal from the single-cell level Interpretation of the subtypes of cancer-infiltrating myeloid immune cells and their interaction network; (5) Revealing the new mechanisms of two targeted myeloid immune cell therapies (anti-CSF1R and anti-CD40) for colorectal cancer at the single-cell scale for the first time , A class of immune cells and molecules (SPP1 + TAM) discovered that affect the drug resistance of targeted tumor-associated macrophage blockers can be used as new strategies and next-generation targets for the development of colorectal cancer immunotherapy drugs; (6) The first to integrate single-cell omics data for the treatment of tumor patients and mouse tumor models, to study tumor immunotherapy mechanisms and examples of applications (the results were selected as one of the 9 best medical studies in the world in 2020 by the "Cell" magazine) .