Introduction of the Team
Team Leader: Prof. ZHANG Yonghui, dean of School of Pharmacy. He has awarded several titles including Distinguished Young Scholars of NSFC (2017), Changjiang Scholars of Ministry of Education of China (2016), the Innovation Leading Talents of National "10,000 People Plan" in Science and Technology (2017), and the Innovative Leading Talents in Science and Technology (2016). He is also the Director of the Hubei Key Laboratory of Natural Medicinal Chemistry and Resource Evaluation and the associate editor of Natural Medicinal Chemistry 2016 published by People's Medical Publishing House (PMPH). His major research interests focus on Natural Medicinal Chemistry and Innovative Drugs Development.
Team Members:
Prof. XUE Yongbo, specialist in Active Natural Products from Medicinal Plants and Fungi.
Prof. WANG Jianping, focus on natural medicine resources.
Prof. LUO Zengwei, expert in natural products organic synthesis.
Prof. ZHOU Qun, focus on pharmacological activity of natural products and its mechanism of action.
Prof. ZHOU Yuan, specialist in natural medicine chemistry and synthetic biology.
Prof. ZHU Hucheng, focus on Active Natural Products from Medicinal Plants and Fungi.
Dr. CHEN Chunmei, specialized in Active Natural Products from Medicinal Plants and Fungi.
Main Research Areas
1. Novel secondary metabolites from fungi and their bio-activities.
2. PPAPs from the genus Hypericum and their bio-activities.
3. New drugs or health products derived from a rare and precious traditional Chinese medicine Anoectochilus roxburghii.
Background & Significance
Natural products are important secondary metabolites of plants and microorganisms produced during their long-term evolution and adaptation to the environment, which help them to compete with other species and resist insect infestations. Meanwhile, natural products are the most important source of new drugs as more than 60% of the small molecule drugs are derived directly or indirectly from natural products since 1981. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded by You-you Tu for her great contribution to the research of Artemisinin from the traditional Chinese medicines, which shows that there is still a brilliant future for natural product research!
There are four main research areas of our group, including the discovery of active natural products, the pharmacodynamics and mechanism of natural products, the biosynthesis of active natural products, and the structure-activity relationship of natural lead compounds. We devote ourselves to the study on the secondary metabolites of more than twenty kinds of fungi such as Aspergillus, and more than thirty kinds of medicinal plants such as Hypericum distributed in central China. So far, more than 2000 active natural products including cytochalasans, terpenoids, and PPAPs, have been isolated and identified, and over 800 of them are new ones, including 65 compounds with new carbon skeletons, which belonging to 32 different new framework types. Notably, nine of the isolated compounds were rated as hot off the press by Nat. Prod. Rep., and more than ten natural products or derivatives are potential for drug development. We have obtained remarkable achievement in the area of the identification and activity evaluation of complex and trace natural products, the pharmacology and mechanism of the active compounds.
Achievement, Awards, Publications
The team has won all kinds of research projects with total funds 40+ million Yuan, published more than 90 SCI papers in recent 5 years, including Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. (4 articles), Hepatology (1 article), Chem. Sci. (1 article), Org. Lett. (11 articles). In addition, our group have held many international conferences, including co-chaired the “Sino-German international Conference on Natural Products”(2015) and “Sino-German-Marburg Pharmaceutical Summit” (2017), and also made some speeches on international conferences. Prof. Zhang now serves as the associate editor of “Current Medical Science", and still serves on the editorial boards of “SCI-REP”, “Journal of Pharmacology”, and “Pharmaceutical Progress”, etc.
Team Contact: Prof. ZHOU Qun, zqtcm@163.com
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