News

On 19 February, Professor Jeremy Nicholson, Director of Australian National Phenome Centre at Murdoch University, delivered an insightful seminar titled, “TCM and Systems Medicine and the Role of Modern Spectroscopy in the Biomedical Discover Population Health” at HKBU, at the invitation of Professor Zhang Hongjie, Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning) from School of Chinese Medicine (SCM) and Professor Wang Jun from the Department of Chemistry.  As a pioneer in biomedicine, particularly in the field of metabolic phenotyping, Professor Nicholson served previously as the Head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London, and the Director of The UK National Phenome Centre. In 2017, he collaborated with SCM to establish the Hong Kong Traditional Chinese Medicine Phenome Research Centre, the only phenome centre working on Chinese medicine within the global phenome research network.

In his seminar, Professor Nicholson elucidated the idea of phenome and the dynamic interactions between environment and human genes. His research team has developed systemic detection methods in visualising metabolic phenotypes utilising spectroscopic tools, including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. These applications of spectroscopic tools not only facilitate the clinical diagnosis but also accelerate the drug discovery cycle for natural products, including traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

Professor Nicholson emphasised the importance of microbiome-host metabolic axes in systems biology and TCM drug development. He suggested that the microbial modulation in gut can significantly impact the efficacy of drugs, including TCMs, and therefore should also be considered as therapeutic targets in development of novel drugs.

This seminar reaffirmed the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in advancing  Chinese medicine and highlighted the School’s commitment to integrating traditional medical wisdom with cutting-edge technology.