Xinxia Peng

About

Xinxia Peng, PhD, is a tenured Full Professor of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences at North Carolina State University and a member of the NC State Bioinformatics Research Center. She earned her PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from the University of Tennessee – Oak Ridge National Laboratory Graduate School of Genome Science and Technology, where she studied under Computer Science Professor Dr. Michael Langston. After completing her PhD, she began her career as a Bioinformatics Manager at Seattle BioMed, now known as the Center for Global Infectious Disease Research. In 2008, she joined the University of Washington Department of Microbiology as a Computational Research Scientist and was promoted to Research Assistant Professor in 2012. In July 2016, she moved to NC State as part of the Dean’s Faculty Excellence cluster hires in the field of Translational Genomics of Infectious Diseases and became a member of the Bioinformatics Research Center. In recognition of her contributions, she was named one of NC State’s 2025-26 class of University Faculty Scholars in 2026.

Research topics

• Biology
• Computational biology
• Genetics
• Internal medicine
• Chemistry
• Immunology
• Anatomy
• Cancer research
• Virology
• Pathology

Selected publications

• Inhalation of lung spheroid cell secretome and exosomes promotes lung repair in pulmonary fibrosis

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 432 citations

  Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a fatal and incurable form of interstitial lung disease in which persistent injury results in scar tissue formation. As fibrosis thickens, the lung tissue loses the ability to facilitate gas exchange and provide cells with needed oxygen. Currently, IPF has few treatment options and no effective therapies, aside from lung transplant. Here we present a series of studies utilizing lung spheroid cell-secretome (LSC-Sec) and exosomes (LSC-Exo) by inhalation to t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interleukin-15 response signature predicts RhCMV/SIV vaccine efficacy

  PLoS Pathogens · 2021 · 31 citations

  Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) challenge of rhesus macaques (RMs) vaccinated with strain 68-1 Rhesus Cytomegalovirus (RhCMV) vectors expressing SIV proteins (RhCMV/SIV) results in a binary outcome: stringent control and subsequent clearance of highly pathogenic SIV in ~55% of vaccinated RMs with no protection in the remaining 45%. Although previous work indicates that unconventionally restricted, SIV-specific, effector-memory (EM)-biased CD8+ T cell responses are necessary for efficacy, the…

  DOI

• Systematic Profiling of Full-Length Ig and TCR Repertoire Diversity in Rhesus Macaque through Long Read Transcriptome Sequencing

  The Journal of Immunology · 2020 · 30 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  ) are key for modeling human immune responses, placing critical importance on the accurate annotation and quantification of their Ig and TCR repertoires. However, because of incomplete reference resources, the coverage and accuracy of the traditional targeted amplification strategies for profiling rhesus Ig and TCR repertoires are largely unknown. In this study, using long read sequencing, we sequenced four Indian-origin rhesus macaque tissues and obtained high-quality, full-length sequences for…

  DOI

• Human long noncoding RNA <i>VILMIR</i> is induced by major respiratory viral infections and modulates the host interferon response

  Journal of Virology · 2025-03-25 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a newer class of noncoding transcripts identified as key regulators of biological processes. Here, we aimed to identify novel lncRNA targets that play critical roles in major human respiratory viral infections by systematically mining large-scale transcriptomic data sets. Using bulk RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) analysis, we identified a previously uncharacterized lncRNA, named virus-inducible lncRNA modulator of interferon response ( VILMIR ), that was cons…

  PublisherDOI

• Alternative splicing and genetic variation of mhc-e: implications for rhesus cytomegalovirus-based vaccines

  Communications Biology · 2022-12-19 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Rhesus cytomegalovirus (RhCMV)-based vaccination against Simian Immunodeficiency virus (SIV) elicits MHC-E-restricted CD8+ T cells that stringently control SIV infection in ~55% of vaccinated rhesus macaques (RM). However, it is unclear how accurately the RM model reflects HLA-E immunobiology in humans. Using long-read sequencing, we identified 16 Mamu-E isoforms and all Mamu-E splicing junctions were detected among HLA-E isoforms in humans. We also obtained the complete Mamu-E genomic sequences…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Identifying cellular long non-coding RNAs as targets for HIV intervention

  NIH · $431k · 2016–2019

• NIH Grant R21AI120713

  NIH · $445k · 2018

Frequent coauthors

• Michael G. Katze

  University of Washington

  59 shared

• Matthew J. Thomas

  Boehringer Ingelheim (Germany)

  29 shared

• Richard Green

  28 shared

• Hayden Brochu

  North Carolina State University

  25 shared

• Jennifer Tisoncik-Go

  University of Washington

  24 shared

• Yoshihiro Kawaoka

  24 shared

• G. Lynn Law

  Institute of Translational Health Sciences

  21 shared

• Gary P. Schroth

  Illumina (United States)

  19 shared

Labs

• Peng LabPI

Similar researchers at North Carolina State University

• Fred Wrighth-85
• Zhao-Bang Zengh-44
• Gavin Conanth-38