主  题：Creating Physiologically Relevant Cellular Models for Development of Novel Therapeutics – A Bright Future for Traditional Chinese Medicine

时  间：2014年12月17日周三上午10:00—12:00

地  点：仙林校区丰盛楼学术报告厅

主讲人：Keming Song, Ph. D.（Research Fellow and Manager of Science and Technology Affairs Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, USA）

主讲人简介：

Dr. Keming Song is a Research Fellow and Manager of Science and Technology Affairs at Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (USA), responsible for prospecting new platform technologies and establishing external scientific collaborations. Dr. Song has more than 25 years of research experience in diverse fields of life sciences, particularly in genetics, cell biology, and molecular biology. Dr. Song joined Sigma in 1998 and has served as group leader and R&D manager for several research teams and has developed/directed development of more than 50 commercial products.Before joining Sigma, Dr. Song served as senior scientist and team leader at Johnson & Johnson Clinical Diagnostics and Applied Biosystems (now Life Technology), and developed products for clinical diagnosis of HIV. Dr. Song is one of the visionary scientists at Sigma and has introduced a variety of new technologies to Sigma, including RNAi and ZFN technologies. From 2010 to 2012, Dr. Song established and supervised a collaborative research program between Sigma-Aldrich and Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health (GIBH) for generation of high quality iPS cells derived from normal and diseased human specimens and for creation of isogenic iPS cells with genetic modifications that mimic disease-associated mutations. Dr. Song’s current research interest is to combine somatic cell reprogramming and gene targeting technologies to create novel cellular models that can be used for studying disease mechanisms and for development of new therapeutics for currently none-curable genetic diseases. 

主讲内容：

New drug development has been a lengthy and expensive process. Based on data from the world top 10 pharmaceutical companies, it will take on average 10 years and cost >$2 billion to bring a new drug to the market. One of the major hurdles in drug development is lack of physiologically relevant cellular models for drug candidate screening and validation, and thus result in drug failure at clinical stage and/or after launch.The advancement of two breakthrough technologies in last decade provides powerful new tools to solve this bottleneck. One is somatic cell reprogramming technology discovered by 2012 noble-prize winner Dr. Yamanaka. This technology enables researchers to obtain embryonic stem cell-like cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs, from mature cells such as fibroblasts, blood cells, and urine cells, etc. iPSCs can be generated from people with certain diseases and then be re-differentiated into specific cell types to manifest disease phenotypes in vitro (“disease in dish”). The other technology is targeted genome editing, including ZFN, TALEN, and CRISPR. Targeted genome editing allows researchers to create disease associated genetic modifications (knockout, knock-in, and gene modification) in iPSCs under isogenic conditions. Therefore, combinations of iPSC and targeted genome editing technologies provide unlimited opportunities for creating physiologically relevant cellular models that can be used for studying mechanisms underlying all kinds of diseases (e.g. alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, cancer) and for faster and more cost-effective drug screening processes. This presentation will review recent progress in building novel cellular models using iPSC and genome editing technologies. Applications of these new platform technologies in exploring the potential of TCM will be discussed in detail.