The Surging Tide of Scientific Research in China
NaMeS students are invited to IPC PAS Seminar Lecture:
Prof. Luyuan Li
Director, State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology
Nankai University College of Pharmacy
China
Tuesday 20th June, 12:00
Assembly hall of the IPC PAS, Kasprzaka 44/52, PL-01 224 Warszawa
Abstract
It seems that China has caught up with the advancing tide of modern science in the last two decades. The amount of scientific publications increases markedly each year, now second only to the United States in total numbers annually. Improvement in the quality of the research is also evident as a rising number of important discoveries authored by Chinese scientists now frequently appear in most highly influential journals, especially in the fields of chemistry and biological sciences. The surge is likely driven by increasingly sizable government spending on science and technology development as well as by the repatriation of tens of thousands of Western-trained scientists. One essential component of the infrastructure of the Chinese scientific community is the system of the State Key Laboratories, more than 250 strong and covering a wide range of research fields. Most of the SKLs are affiliated with major research universities and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. An example is the State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology at Nankai University. Inaugurated in 2011, the SKLMCB is a multidisciplinary research laboratory currently consisting of a faculty of 54 Principal Investigators interested in disease mechanisms, medicinal chemistry, bio-analysis, and nanomaterials. Their research is supported mainly by funds from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Science Foundation of China in the form of program grants and investigator-initiated research grants. The researchers in the SKLMCB have achieved considerable advances in the areas of mechanisms of cancer development, stem cell biology, multimode probes for bio-imaging, and biomimetic polymers, among others. They collectively published more than 800 papers in 2011-2015 in international scientific journals, with the Impact Factors averaging 5.07. The publications were apparently influential, averaging 13 citations per paper in the five years, with more than 100 of these papers cited 10 or more times each year, and 8 of them being among the top one percentile of the most cited papers world-wide. Additionally, a first-in-class anti-glioblastoma new drug is being tested in clinical trials, and two investigational new drug applications are recently approved by the Chinese Food and Drug Administration.
