On April 15, 2024, invited by Prof. Xiaochuan Wang of the Department of Pathophysiology of School of Basic Medicine, Prof. Bin ZHANG, Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transformative Disease Modeling, and Chen MING, Assistant Professor of the University of Macau paid a visit to BMS and gave thought-inspiring academic reports.
Bin Zhang is the Willard T.C. Johnson Research Professor of Neurogenetics in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and is a faculty member of the Icahn Genomics Institute. His extensive experience in electrical engineering, computer science and computational biology empowers him to build up highly predictive models for very complex data from handwritten document images to large-scale cancer genomic data. His latest research that uncovered dramatic changes in gene-gene interaction patterns in Alzheimer’s disease and pinpointed an immune/microglia gene network as the top pathway causally linked to the disease was published in Cell.
Dr. Chen Ming used to be a postdoctoral fellow at Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and became an assistant professor at Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Macau. Her research focuses on investigating the pathological mechanism and development of various neurodegenerative diseases, especially Alzheimer's Disease, using computational biology methods. My research utilizes advanced genome sequencing, high-performance computing, mathematical modeling, large-scale multi-omics data, and state-of-art techniques to uncover the molecular mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Prof. Zhang gave a lecture entitled "Network Biology Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease: from Target identification to Drug Discovery" and Dr. Ming gave a lecture entitled "Analyzing genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease from the perspective of multi-omics integration". Their speeches are based on the histological data of autopsy tissues of clinical AD patients, systematically established a multi-level gene network biological model for analysis, and clarified the key molecular changes that drive the progression of AD, which lays a new foundation for the comprehensive investigation of the pathogenesis of AD and the development of effective targeted therapeutic means.
The School of Basic Medicine managed to launch the BMS International Lecture Series in 2022, inviting internationally well-known experts to share the latest findings in medicine and health. The School of Basic Medicine tries to build the event into a brand and sustainable platform based on which a series of high-level international academic activities will be organized. It is hoped that the platform can bring together renowned scholars worldwide to share cutting-edge knowledge. More importantly, scholars can take this opportunity to enhance communication and mutual trust, and explore the potential for in-depth scientific cooperation, thus laying a solid foundation for jointly overcoming major global problems.
