THEME: "Key Concepts in Identifying Drug Leads"
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Title: To Discover Lead Molecules from Plants against Emerging Viruses
A virus is a tiny creature that
can rapidly replicate while resides in the cells of a living organism. New
viruses are constantly emerging and they could pose big threats to human
civilization. It was estimated that the 1918 Spanish H1N1 influenza virus
infection had killed 40-80 million people, and HIV has caused 35 million deaths
since its first report in 1981. The current SAR2-CoV-2 emerged in December of
2019, and we are now still struggling to constrain the new virus that has
killed over 4 million people among 190 million infected cases. However, we, as
humans, did survive from the attacks of many viruses in our long history.
Plants have definitely played a big role in protecting humans during those dire
situations. They are known to be an excellent source to provide unique and
diversified structures, which are essential for new drug discovery. In our
efforts to search for new antiviral molecules from plants, we have established
a sample library that contains more than 6,000 extracts made from the plants
collected from Lingnan region of China. These samples were evaluated for their
antiviral potential against various viruses including HIV, Ebola virus and
SAR2-CoV-2 using our constructed high-throughput antiviral screening system.
The subsequent phytochemical separation of the selected plant leads resulted in
identification of a number of different structural classes of antiviral
molecules. [The work described in this abstract was collaborative efforts within multi-disciplinary cooperative programs
supported by grants from the Research Grants
Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. HKBU12103917, HKBU12103618), the Innovation and Technology Commission of
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (MHP/105/19), and the Health and Medical Research Fund
(HMRF), and the Food and Health Bureau, the Government of the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region (Project No. COVID190214)].
Hongjie Zhang was a faculty member at KIB during 1991 to 2002, and a research
faculty member in the College of Pharmacy, the University of Illinois at
Chicago (UIC) during 2003-2011. He has joined Hong Kong Baptist University as a
faculty member since December of 2011. During his professional career in natural product chemistry, Dr.
Zhang has been involved in a number of diverse research programs, including
drug discovery of natural products and development of alternative medicines. Dr. Zhang has over
30 years of research experience in the isolation, identification, analysis,
synthesis and biological evaluation of small molecules, leading to publication
of over 160 peer reviewed papers and a number of granted patents. His current
research interest is focused on natural products drug discovery from natural resources. Specifically, Dr. Zhang is interested in finding natural lead
compounds from plants against different disease targets such as cancer and
viruses.