All our biological information — the instructions that make us who we are — is encoded in our genes. We get half of our genetic information from our father and half from our mother and, together, this information results in us. But our genes don’t act alone — there is another layer of control that regulates when the instructions in genes are acted upon and when they are not. This extra layer is epigenetics.
Here’s how it works: Essentially every cell in the human body — all 37 trillion of them — has the same set of instructions (that is, the same DNA). But not all the instructions are needed in the same cells at the same time. For example, a heart muscle cell only needs to know how to be a heart muscle cell; it does not need to know how to be a skin cell or a bone cell. Heart, skin and bone cells have the same instruction manual but they read from different chapters. Epigenetics helps ensure the right instructions are used at the right time by annotating DNA with special chemical markers.
As a global leader in epigenetics research, VAI is home to a host of scientists who investigate how epigenetics help keep us healthy and, when things go wrong, how it contributes to diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease, dementias, metabolic disorders and more.
of all cancers involve epigenetic changes*
or 2 meters, is the length of DNA that is packed into every cell in the body
clinical trials of epigenetic cancer drugs launched by the Van Andel Institute–Stand Up To Cancer Epigenetics Dream Team
Biography
Dr. Stephen Baylin earned his M.D. from Duke University in Durham, N.C. in 1968 and completed his internship and first year of residency at the university. He then served as a staff associate at the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart and Lung Institute for two years before returning to Johns Hopkins to complete his residency and fellowship. He was appointed as an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins in 1974 and rose through the ranks, becoming a professor of oncology in 1986 and a professor of medicine in 1990. In 1991, he was appointed chief of the Tumor Biology Division and, the following year, was named as the associate director for research at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. He is currently Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research in the Oncology Department and co-head of Cancer Biology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Baylin has earned numerous prestigious honors, including the 2004 Investigator of the Year Award from NCI SPORE; the 2005 Shubitz Cancer Research Prize from the University of Chicago; and the 2009 Kirk A. Landon-AACR Prize for Basic and Translational Cancer Research, together with Van Andel Institute (VAI) Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Peter A. Jones. In 2011, Drs. Baylin and Jones were jointly awarded the American Cancer Society’s Medal of Honor. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017.
He has authored or co-authored more than 450 publications and served as associate editor of Cancer Research. Dr. Baylin also served on the board of the American Association for Cancer Research Board of Directors from 2004 to 2007, and was the leader of the first SU2C Epigenetics Dream Team, launched in 2009.
He has received numerous honors and accolades, including the 2011 American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, which he shared with Dr. Peter A. Jones; election as a fellow of the American Association of Cancer Research Academy in 2014; and election as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017.
In 2015, he accepted an appointment at VAI as co-leader of the VAI–SU2C Epigenetics Dream Team, which he leads with Dr. Jones, and as a professor in the Center for Epigenetics. In addition to his work at VAI, Dr. Baylin continues his work at Johns Hopkins
Dr. Nick Burton explores two main topics: How a mother’s environment impacts offspring metabolism and how microbiome bacteria can influence animal health. Both of these projects have a particular interest in insulin signaling with a long-term aim of preventing the onset of human pathologies associated with insulin signaling such as Type 2 diabetes. He earned a B.S. in biology from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked in the labs of both Dr. Anna Huttenlocher and Dr. Scott Kennedy. He was then awarded a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and earned a Ph.D. in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied under the mentorship of Dr. H. Robert Horvitz. As part of his dissertation work, Dr. Burton sought to develop new paradigms to study the mechanisms by which parental environment regulates offspring physiology. In 2017, he joined the Centre for Trophoblast Research at University of Cambridge as an independent Next Generation Fellow. While there, he investigated how environmental bacteria can affect development, physiology, metabolism and neuronal function of individuals and their offspring. In 2021, he joined Van Andel Institute as an assistant professor in the Department of Epigenetics; in 2023, he joined the Institute’s Department of Metabolism and Nutritional Programming.
Dr. H. Josh Jang investigates combining epigenetic therapies and immune checkpoint inhibitors to enhance the immune system’s ability to better fight cancer.
He earned his B.S. in health promotion and disease prevention from University of Southern California and his Ph.D. in molecular genetics and genomics from Washington University in St. Louis. During his graduate studies in the lab of Dr. Ting Wang, Dr. Jang concentrated on characterizing transposable elements’ contribution to oncogenic potential in cancer cell line models, as well as other projects that established and optimized targeted epigenetic technologies using CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
In 2020, Dr. Jang joined Van Andel Institute as a VAI Fellow under Drs. Peter A. Jones and Stephen B. Baylin. He has received several prestigious awards for his research including a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence grant and a SPORE Epigenetic Therapies: Career Enhancement Program Award, both from the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. Jang also serves as a reviewer for leading journals such as Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and Genome Research, among others. In 2021, he was selected as a Forbeck Scholar and, in 2023, he chaired the Gordon Research Seminar for Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics.
In 2025, Dr. Jang joined Van Andel Institute’s Department of Cell Biology as an assistant professor. He leverages innovative -omics technologies, such as single-cell, spatial and long-read sequencing methods to interrogate how the tumor microenvironment responds to therapy.
Dr. Derek Janssens develops novel genomics technologies to explore the epigenetic contributors to hematological cancers with the goal of informing
