In the field of modern life science and technology, the Chinese have made many outstanding contributions. This article features eight Chinese-Chinese scientists who have made significant contributions to human health.
Tu Youyou
Artemisinin
Artemisinin is derived from Artemisia annua and is a traditional Chinese herbal medicine. Between 1969 and 1972, the extraction method of artemisinin and the effectiveness of malaria treatment were discovered by Professor Tu Youyou and her team, for which she won the 2011 Lasker Prize in Clinical Medicine and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Science, making her the first Chinese female scientist to win a Nobel Prize.
Malaria is a parasitic infectious disease spread by mosquito bites and, in severe cases, jaundice, epilepsy, coma and death. Before the advent of artemisinin therapy, malaria, along with AIDS and cancer, was listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the world's three major deadly diseases, and 40% of the world's population was threatened, with about 400 million people infected and more than 1 million people dying every year. At that time, the commonly used drug was Chloroquine(Chloroquine), but due to its heavy use, some malaria parasites developed resistance and the efficacy decreased sharply.
Since the advent of artemisinin, the number of people dying from malaria has fallen by 38% globally, and the incidence in 48 of these countries, including 11 African countries, has also fallen by more than 50%. Artemisinin differs from chloroquine in that it has relatively few side effects and a greater range of killing parasites, including malaria parasites that have developed resistance at the time.
Since the early 2000s, artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) has been listed by the WHO as the preferred antimalarial treatment regimen. Act's global market size was $360 million in 2017 and is expected to reach nearly $700 million by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of 8.7%.
The clinical value of artemisinin is not limited to the treatment of malaria. Professor Tu's team has conducted clinical trials of dihydroartemisinin tablets for the treatment of systemic and discoid systemic lupus erythematosus. (Lupus erythematosus is a chronic immune disease that can cause inflammation in tissues throughout the body, causing severe and even death, and there is currently no clinical cure.) ）
David T. Wong
® Prozac®
Dr. David Wang, from Hong Kong, was one of the inventors of Prozac®, which Fortune magazine called the "® medicine of the century." He co-invented the world-selling antidepressant with two other scientists working at Eli Lilly, and was awarded the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association's "Invention of the Year Award" and the "Prince Mahidol Award", both of which are the highest honors in the world pharmaceutical community.
Depression is a common mental illness with about 350 million patients worldwide. Long-term moderate or major depressive disorder has a great impact on the daily lives of patients, and can even lead to suicide, with an estimated 1 million suicide deaths each year.
Before prozac ® was invented, the traditional antidepressants were mainly tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) and monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), but there were many side effects and precautions, such as: not suitable for patients with some cardiovascular diseases; MAOI needed to be avoided with some foods.
Dr. Wang discovered the role of serotonin in regulating mood in the human central nervous system and then joined the team of Ray Fuller and Bryan Molloy to develop a new generation of antidepressants, selective seroregulation inhibitors (SSRIs), traded as Prozac ®.
Compared with TCAs and MAOIs, these drugs are safer, longer half-lives, more stable, and can also be used to treat other indications such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and bulimia nervosa. After its listing, it soon became the most commonly used antidepressant in Europe and the United States.
Since its inception in 1987, Prozac ® has been listed in more than 100 countries and taken by more than 40 million people, making it the world's best-selling antidepressant.
Before the patent expired in 2001, annual peak sales reached $2.3 billion, accounting for one-third of Eli Lilly's total sales.
The San Jose Mercury News voted Prozac as one of the greatest technological innovations of the 20th century, and Time described its huge market potential as "a license to print money."
LinFu-Kuen
Epogen®
Erythropoietin (EPO) is a hormone naturally secreted by the human kidneys that stimulates the regeneration of red blood cells and helps the body's organs and tissues function normally, but patients with chronic kidney failure and patients receiving chemotherapy will suffer from severe anemia due to decreased EPO.
Before the advent of Epogen®, there was no effective treatment for the treatment of renal anemia, and patients needed to receive regular blood transfusions or male hormone therapy every 2 to 3 weeks, but it was not ideal therapy, such as: blood transfusion increased the risk of infection; male hormone therapy could lead to impaired liver function. In the 1980s, when bio-genetic engineering technology was just emerging, Dr. Lin Fukun joined Amgen in the United States. Despite the pressure of insufficient manpower and shortage of funds, it has finally developed Epogen®, ® one of the most successful genetically engineered drugs in history.
This is the world's first generation of erythropoietic hormone stimulators (ESAs) and Amgen's first biogenetically engineered drug: it uses recombinant DNA technology to replicate large amounts of erythropoietin, which is injected into the body to reduce the number of blood transfusions and complications in patients with kidney disease.
The excellent clinical efficacy led to the drug being approved for marketing in just three and a half years, and sales peaked at $12.6 billion in 2006, benefiting countless anemia patients. As a result, Amgen went from a start-up on the verge of bankruptcy to a giant in American biotechnology and received the National Medal of Technology. In the global ESA market, Amgen is an absolute leader.
Patrick Soon-Shiong
Abraxane®
Paclitaxel is a natural product extracted from yew that has been widely used for more than 50 years to treat a variety of solid tumors. In the 1990s, the first generation of paclitaxel Taxol® had a very obvious defect: because the preparation contained an excipient 14 (Excipient), polyoxyl 35 castor oil, there was a 2% to 4% probability of causing a serious allergic reaction, so patients needed to inject antiallergic drugs such as corticosteroids or antihistamines before chemotherapy.
Dr. Huang Xinxiang, a Chinese doctor born in South Africa and later immigrated to the United States, was eager to find a breakthrough in the dosage form of paclitaxel, so he founded Abraxis Bioscience, which uses protein nanoparticle transport technology (nab), which is to make nanoparticles by high-pressure vibration technology of paclitaxel and human blood albumin. In addition to not causing severe allergic reactions, this dosage form can also promote the drug to enter the tumor cells and enhance the efficacy.
After nearly 10 years, Dr. Huang and his team finally developed albumin paclitaxel (Abraxane®), which was approved by the US FDA for breast cancer treatment in 2005, the first-line treatment of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer that cannot be treated with chemotherapy or curative treatment in 2012, and the first-line treatment of metastatic pancreatic cancer in 2013. Due to its better safety and efficacy than Taxol®, Abraxane® has been highly appreciated by the market after market launch, and as of 2015, it has been approved for clinical application in more than 40 countries around the world.
Abraxane's® global sales reached $990 million in 2017 and remained at around $1 billion per year in the following years.
In 2010, Abraxis was acquired by Celgene for $2.9 billion, and Dr. Huang also became the richest Chinese businessman in the United States by becoming the richest Chinese businessman in the United States with a net worth of $5.5 billion that year.
David Ho
Cocktail therapy
AIDS is a major infectious disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), because the virus can attack the human immune system, patients often contract various diseases or tumors, and the mortality rate is extremely high. Since the first cases appeared in 1981, AIDS has claimed more than 30 million lives.
At the beginning of the discovery of AIDS, the medical community knew little about it, and there was a lack of effective treatment measures, although single drug or dual antiviral therapy can prolong the survival of patients, but the efficacy is limited, the toxic side effects are serious, so AIDS was almost regarded as a terminal disease at that time.
Until the dawn of the first light in 1995, with the advent of protease inhibitors, Professor He Dayi discovered the "Cocktail Therapy" (HAART), which is also recognized as the best way to treat AIDS.
HAART is a combination of 3 or more antiviral drugs, each with a different mechanism of action or for different parts of the HIV virus replication cycle, so as to maximize the inhibition of viral replication and avoid the resistance caused by a single drug.
The widespread use of HAART has rapidly reduced mortality from 100% to 20%, prolonging the survival time of patients after infection.
In 1996, Professor He was selected as the Annual Person of the Year by Time Magazine, the first scientist to be elected since the 1960s. In the same year, the American magazine "Science" named cocktail therapy as the first of the top ten most influential scientific breakthroughs.
In 2002, Professor He transferred the patented Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center vaccine manufacturing technology led by him to China for a symbolic price of $1 per year, hoping to contribute to China's AIDS prevention and control work.
The global anti-HIV drug market reached $34 billion in 2018 and is expected to grow further to $46.8 billion by 2023, with an average annual compound growth rate of 6.0%.
Dennis Lo
Noninvasive DNA prenatal testing
Professor Lo is currently the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chinese, Hong Kong and an Academician of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences. His "non-invasive prenatal diagnostic technology" (NIPT) was named one of the top ten breakthrough technologies of 2013 by the MIT Technology Review.
In 2016, he won the life sciences prize of the inaugural Future Science Prize for his research at NIPT and was selected as one of the "20 Top Translational Research Scientists in the World" by Nature Biotechnology for three consecutive years (2016-2018). In 2021, the Royal Society announced Professor Lu as the winner of the annual "Royal Medal" in the discipline of biology, the first Chinese winner since the establishment of the award nearly 200 years ago.
In 1997, Professor Lu discovered the presence of free fetal DNA in the peripheral blood of pregnant women, which is an important theoretical basis for NIPT technology. The principle of NIPT: by collecting the blood of pregnant women and combining the second-generation sequencing technology, it is determined whether the fetal chromosome sequence in the blood is normal, and then used for screening genetic diseases such as Down syndrome.
Traditional prenatal diagnosis is mainly based on serological screening, and if high-risk is detected, it needs to be further confirmed by invasive methods such as amniocentesis. However, there are many flaws in these methods, such as serology for Down syndrome detection rate of only 70%, amniocentesis has a 0.3% risk of miscarriage.
In contrast, NIPT, which has a detection rate of more than 99% through blood sampling and is safer and more effective, is currently the preferred method of prenatal diagnosis worldwide, widely used in more than 90 countries, and benefits more than 7 million pregnant women each year. The global NIPT market size is $3.48 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $13.16 billion in 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of 18%.
In addition to Down syndrome, Professor Lu's team also successfully deciphered the whole genome map of the fetus by analyzing trace amounts of DNA in the mother's plasma, and predicted a variety of genetic diseases early.
At present, the team is working on the application of plasma DNA sequencing technology to cancer detection, including early screening of nasopharyngeal cancer.
Chen Lieping
PD-1/PD-L1
Professor Chen Lieping is a global pioneer in anti-cancer immunotherapy. In the 1990s, while working at the Mayo Clinic, he demonstrated for the first time that overexpression of PD-L1 immunoglobulin-like molecules protects tumor cells from escaping the immune response.
Since then, he has elucidated that monoclonal antibodies can block the binding of PD-1/PD-L1 and strengthen the body's anti-cancer ability. In 2006, he developed a biomarker for PD-L1 at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and opened the first clinical trial of a PD-1 antibody.
Professor Chen's research provides a revolutionary treatment for cancer. PD-1/PD-L1 antibody therapy has been shown to be effective in a variety of malignant solid tumors, the overall safety is better than that of traditional cytotoxic drugs, has a wide range of indications potential, and has high clinical and commercial value.
As of September 2020, 10 monoclonal antibodies targeting PD-1/PD-L1 have been approved for marketing worldwide, of which 6 have been approved in the United States to treat 17 different cancer types and two indications for unlimited cancer species; and about 4400 PD-1/PD-L1 monoclonal antibody programs are in clinical trials.
In 2017, the global PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor market size has reached $10.1 billion, becoming one of the fastest listed and best-selling oncology drugs in history, and is expected to further reach $36.4 billion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 29.3%.
Professor Chan is well known for his discoveries in the PD-1/PD-L1 field. In 2014, he received the William B. Coley Award for Immunology. In 2017, he won the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize and was the third Chinese scientist to receive the prize after Jian Yuewei and Tu Youyou. In 2018, he won the Giants of Cancer Care Award; although he missed the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in the same year, his contribution to the fight against cancer in the world has gone far beyond the significance of the award.
Zhang Feng
Gene editing technology CRISPR-Cas9
Dr. Feng Zhang is currently the youngest Chinese tenured professor in the history of MIT, and his most famous research work is the development and application of CRISPR-Cas system, which is currently one of the hottest emerging gene editing technologies. He was named one of the top ten science figures of the year in 2013 by Nature magazine and won the Canada Gairdner Awards in 2016.
CRISPR-Cas is an immune system distributed in the genomes of bacteria and archaea that fights viral invasion, and its principle is to use viral DNA (CRISPR) inserted into the genome as a guide sequence to cut the genomic material of the invading virus through CRISPR-associated enzymes (Cas). Dr. Zhang began the research and development of CRISPR-Cas9 in 2011 and published it in the journal Science in 2013, proving that this technology can be applied to the editing of mammalian cell genes, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent development of CRISPR-Cas gene editing technology.
CRISPR-Cas technology has great social value, and many breakthroughs have been made in the application of health, including: building aging models, editing AIDS virus, cutting hepatitis B virus, etc., which can form more effective therapies and drugs. Compared with previous gene editing technologies such as ZFN and TALEN, CRISPR-Cas technology has the advantages of simplicity, precision, low cost, and wide range of use.
The global CRISPR gene editing market reached $550 million in 2018 and is expected to further increase to $3.1 billion by 2023, representing a COMPOUND annual growth rate of 33%, making it the fastest growing technology in the gene editing technology market.
At present, The company edited by Dr. Zhang , EDIT.US , focuses on drug development using the CRISPR-Cas system for a number of genetic diseases such as eye diseases, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and neurological disorders. In addition, the company has partnered with Allergan to develop the world's first CRISPR gene-editing therapy to enter clinical trials to treat a rare disease that causes blindness, Leber Congenital Melatoxin 10 (LCA10).
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