China on the books

“In Italy, where I was born, children acquire the first notions about China by reading the book that Marco Polo wrote 700 years ago,” said Professor Aldo Tagliabue, “he was a Venetian merchant, explorer and writer who travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295.”

Marco Polo’s journeys were recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo (also known as Book of the Marvels of the World or Il Milione), a document that described to Europeans the mysterious culture and inner workings of the Eastern world, and was the first comprehensive look into China, Persia, India, Japan, and other Asian countries.

For many years, China remained a great fantasy in Professor Tagliabue’s imagination. Then, during his life, he was able to observe the growth of China and learn about its impressive progress from abroad, until at the beginning of 2000 he could finally start to know it in person.

Professor Tagliabue is now a senior scientist at the Italian National Research Council and co-founder of Achilles Vaccines, Italy. He is an immunologist and vaccinologist who has been active in the field for over 40 years.

Collaborate with scientists in China

His first trip to China was in 2005. At that time he was working in Seoul, South Korea, as R&D Director for the International Vaccine Institutes (IVI). Within a global team, his role was that of creating the new research facilities of the institute and starting of R&D operations. Today, the IVI has become an important protagonist in the vaccine field at the global level.

“We firstly granted ‘Diseases of the Most Impoverished Program’,” said Professor Tagliabue, “it aims to generate scientific evidence of the burden of cholera, typhoid fever, and shigellosis in Asia and to develop vaccines for those diseases.”

As time went by, Professor Tagliabue found himself in the position of coordinating a group of Chinese scientists, including those from Fudan University in Shanghai, who were working at IVI, together with a group of European colleagues to prepare a project proposal aimed at developing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. In 2005, the project team held their annual meeting in Shanghai. This was when Professor Tagliabue could visit China for the first time.

GW Lee, Director General of the World Health Organization (second from left) with IVI Research Director Aldo Tagliabue (first from left) and IVI Director General John D. Clemens. [Image: Professor Aldo Tagliabue]

The EU SARSVAC project team meeting in Shanghai in 2004. [Image: Professor Aldo Tagliabue]

Breakthrough revolution in the field of vaccines

In those years, it became evident that vaccines were the best tool to prevent and fight the spread of infections. After almost 200 years from the first vaccine against smallpox developed by Edward Jenner, new technologies emerged that made it possible to produce safer and efficient new vaccines.

In 2007, the Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health (NVGH) was created in Siena, Italy, with the not-for-profit mission to develop effective and affordable vaccines for neglected infectious diseases in developing countries, and Professor Tagliabue went to work for NVGH.

This was the first time that a large vaccine manufacturer created an institute to use the knowledge and resources of a company to produce the vaccines desperately needed in the developing world. Professor Tagliabue planned to work closely with researchers in developed and developing countries.

In this scenario of vaccines at the global level, some Chinese researchers came to visit Professor Tagliabue’s laboratory in Siena and his wife and colleague Professor Diana Boraschi’s lab in Pisa. These visits aimed to share scientific experiences and to make experiments together.

Participants at the meeting for designing the programs for NVGH [Image: Professor Aldo Tagliabue]

Establish long-term cooperation with China

In 2010, Li Yang, now an associate professor at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), came to work in Italy. Through his introduction, Professor Tagliabue became aware of CAS’s President’s International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) and started to think that it could be a good chance to work in China and to start a new career in the Chinese scientific environment.

Li extended his invitation in 2019 to Professor Boraschi and Professor Tagliabue to join his research group at SIAT, and they brought their experience to create an excellence team of researchers in the field of immune responses to infections and vaccine development.

Professor Tagliabue made his application and finally received the support of CAS-PIFI as Visiting Scientist, and it was a very important moment in his life. In September 2021, he and his wife finally landed in Shenzhen, Guangdong.

“Diana and I took the decision to move to China,” said Professor Tagliabue, “our daughter Marzia gave us as a gift a book entitled ‘The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City’ written by Du Juan, an award-winning architect and urban planner.”

Professor Tagliabue also learned that modern Shenzhen was the result of the project for establishing a Special Economic Zone in Guangdong, originated by Deng Xiaoping. “Deng is a historical leader that transformed China,” said Professor Tagliabue, “he is very well known in the western world by people of my generation.”

Despite the fact that in his life he had traveled a lot, to move from a small town like Siena in Italy, that still has a lot of well-preserved mediaeval buildings and a population of less than 60,000 inhabitants, to an extremely modern city of 17 million people like Shenzhen, which was completely built in the last 40 years gave him an impression not unlike traveling in space. But the beauty of life is to accept the challenges and try to adjust oneself to new environments.

“Food, tropical climate and language were the most striking changes for me in China,” said Professor Tagliabue, “but the solutions to all these novelties were provided by kindness and respect from the Chinese new friends that I met at work and in private life.”

Professor Tagliabue started his activities at SIAT to promote the knowledge of immunology and the translation of science particularly in the fields of vaccines and treatment of autoimmune diseases with biopharmaceuticals including monoclonal antibodies.

A particularly pleasant and successful moment for Professor Tagliabue was the seminar organized by the International Cooperation Office of SIAT on May 19, 2021, where he talked with young experts and students about his wonderful life experiences. The main message of the seminar was the importance of expanding one’s research boundary worldwide; after all, “science has no borders.”

What’s more important was that after almost one year of preparation, Professor Tagliabue, together with Professor Boraschi, started to build a new research unit named “Laboratory of Inflammation and Vaccines” at SIAT, with a group of young Chinese scientists.

This is a laboratory aiming to develop novel immunotherapeutic drugs and vaccines. The capacity of the lab is to control and regulate inflammatory responses and determine whether a person can successfully overcome an infection or a disease, or whether the immune reaction will become pathological.

“Vaccine development will exploit knowledge about controlling inflammation, and harness its powerful capacity to amplify specific protective immunity and immunological memory,” said Professor Tagliabue.

The team will make strong efforts to transfer research outputs into new preventive and therapeutic strategies, hoping science can truly benefit ordinary people.

“Although I did not have the opportunity to visit all the beautiful places in China,” said Professor Tagliabue, “being a tourist in the country for me is just a memory of past visits, but now the time has come to visit colleagues here, build common projects and enjoy the monuments, experience the natural scenarios and the culture of the empire that we have known as kids from the book of Marco Polo.”

Professor Aldo Tagliabue at his presentation of PIFI Talk. [IMAGE: SIAT]

Source: Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT),

Chinese Academy of Sciences