On October 23, Professor Hua Zichun, of the School of Life Sciences at Nanjing University, gave students from the top-ranking classes a lecture titled “Modern Biotechnology: Changing life through innovation”, a topic on the origin, current state, and great future prospects of modern biotechnology in terms of its scope, role, development stages and representative applications to reveal this technology.
Professor Hua, formerly executive dean of the School of Life Sciences at Nanjing University, now serves as a doctoral supervisor in the school and chief director of State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology. He is a Chang Jiang Scholar honored by the Ministry of Education. He has long been engaged in protein engineering and genetic engineering of polypeptide drugs and the integrated research on the relationship between protein structures and their functions as well as the cells’ apoptosis signal transduction pathways.
In this lecture, Hua started by easy-to-understand explaining what modern biological science and technology is. He argued that the technology has brought great changes to human disease treatment and health care in its rapid development. He elaborated this in four aspects latter: cloning technology, medical biotechnology, biotechnology & biomedical materials, and biotransformation & traditional pharmaceutical products.
First, the cloning technology has experienced three periods of development: microbial cloning, biotechnology cloning, and animal cloning. Hua put together the birth and development of animal cloning, or stem cell technology, by sharing the chronological examples including Dolly, the sheep cloned by replicating the adult somatic cell nuclear, the experiment involving breast stem cell transplanting on female mice, carried out by the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, and the creation of transgenic animals for the purpose of providing organs for transplantation.
Second, the field of biotechnology medicine can be divided into the disease genetics, diagnostics, prevention, and therapeutics. As an example, Hua said that the early detection of tumors relied on physical and chemical means, which could not supply timely results. The advent of biotechnology has enabled us to study diseases at the genetic level and make early detections, thus opening up a new frontier for the diagnosis and prevention of diseases. He introduced a range of emerging technologies such as gene diagnosis, biochips, DNA vaccines, gene engineering drugs, nucleic acid drugs, gene therapy, organ transplantation, and biomedical materials, all of which hold great prospects in future development. In addition, Hua presented a set of analytical charts of the TOP 100 drugs in the global market and pointed out that biological drugs only accounted for about a quarter of the total, but they took up 70% of the top 10 on the list, reflecting the largely economic and potentially social benefits.
Finally, Professor Hua Zichun explained the discovery awarded 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine: How cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability. With this example, he encouraged the students to explore biotechnology, which, he said, is like a door waiting to be opened and will greatly shape future society.
