Innovation and Development

Latest Modulation of Big Bang

On Mar. 30, Large Hadron Collider（LHC）successfully collided two beams of protons with a total energy of seven trillion electron volts. This is the highest energy-level proton beams’ collision experiment conducted in LHC so far. The collision would take several hours or even several days. According to the bulletin of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), scientists wished to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy in the collider, in order to carry out in-depth research of the origin of the universe and the properties of various particles. As the largest one of its type in the world, LHC is located near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is contained in a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 27 kilometers. Four detectors have been constructed in the tunnel, which are Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS), LHC-beauty（LHCb）and A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE). LHC was designed in early 1990s. About 7,000 scientists and engineers from over 80 countries and regions participated in the construction of LHC. China participated in the construction and experiments of all the four detectors.

New Mechanism for Anti-Cancer Drugs

Recently, more than 30 thiazolidinediones (TZDs) were identified as potent and high selective small-molecular IGF-1R inhibitors through a hierarchical virtual screening strategy developed with complementing pharmacophore-based screening and docking-based screening techniques, the established stable small-molecular IGF-1R inhibitors screening platform, structure activity relationship analysis, molecular biotechnology, cell biotechnology and other approaches and technologies. This research progress was collaboratively fulfilled by two research teams from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM), CAS led separately by Jiang Hualiang and Ding Jian, and another team from the School of Pharmacy, East China University of Technology led by Li Honglin. A large number of epidemiological and pathological research has indicated that IGF-1 receptor is over-expressed in many types of human tumor cells due to the increase in insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), thereby increasing the risk of developing cancers. IGF-1R is a promising research target for cancer therapy; therefore, finding novel and high selective IGF-1R inhibitors maintains important clinical significance and sound application prospects. The result of this collaborative research laid a solid foundation for the development of new antitumor agents. The result was recently published on the latest issue of Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (2010, 53: 2661–2665). SIMM has formed a partnership with the School of Pharmacy, East China University of Technology in developing new antitumor drugs with IGF-1R as target for therapy. In addition to the result mentioned above, the collaborative research team has obtained more than 130 TDZ derivates through modification of the molecular structures.