Professor DING Jian is a renowned Chinese cancer pharmacologist and Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He is currently a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was Director of the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, CAS (2004-2013). A dozen of prizes and awards of great significances have been awarded, including the 2nd prize of the National Natural Science Award (twice), 2nd prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, Medal from the 2nd National Innovation and Pioneer Award, Chinese Academy of Sciences Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Award, Tan Jiazhen Life Sciences Achievement Award, the 1st prize of the Shanghai Natural Science Award (twice), the 1st prize of the Shanghai Science and Technology Progress Award, among others.
Professor DING Jian was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. He obtained his doctoral degree from Kyushu University, Japan, in 1992. Over the years, as a leading pioneer in the Chinese pharmacological community, Professor DING has made extraordinary achievements in the research area of anti-cancer drugs. He led and established an evaluation system for anti-cancer drugs screening and pharmacodynamics, which fits international standards and provides important technical support and capacity guarantee for China’s independent research and development of anti-cancer innovative drugs. In the last five years, in the context of “precision medicine”, Professor DING and his team aimed at international frontiers, envisioned a four-in-one drug translation research and development platform, which is comprised of “research and development of anti-cancer drugs – exploration of sensitive biomarkers – studies of drug resistance mechanisms – formulation of concomitant drugs prescriptions”, focused on the research area of cancer protein kinase, explored epigenetics, cancer metabolism and tumor immune microenvironment, and developed individualized anti-cancer new drugs based on the typology of cancer molecules in response to different vulnerable groups, which has yielded impressive research outcomes.
The new anti-cancer drug candidates developed by Professor DING and his team have constructed a development and research channel for new anti-cancer drugs, which is internationally competitive. At this stage, there are 12 new drug candidates, of which he is one of the principal inventors and which have independent intellectual property rights, being in clinical research, and 6 of which are concurrently in clinical research in the U.S., and a number of other new drug candidates are now going through systematic pre-clinical research review. More than 280 invention patents at home and abroad have been authorized or filed for application. Over ten new drugs have completed translation or transfer, which has produced tremendous economic and societal benefits.
Professor DING Jian centered on key science problems of anti-cancer drug research, led his team to place emphasis on elucidating the new mechanisms for anti-cancer drugs and discovering new biomarkers, presented a systematic explanation to the pharmacological mechanisms of new anti-cancer drug candidates, uncovered the structural basis and mechanism of action for the interactions of several targeted drugs, discovered the efficacy monitoring markers for serial molecular targeted drugs, and over 330 SCI papers have been published in journals such as Cell, Cancer Cell, Cell Res, Hepatology, Nat Commun, J Nat Cancer Inst, Clin Cancer Res, and Cancer Res, with citations of over 7600 times .
Since the State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicines was founded in 2011, Professor DING has made outstanding contributions to the academic development of the SKL serving as member/principal member of the Academic Committee.