Professor Zhishu Huang, Professor Lianquan Gu, and Professor Ding Li, Principal Investigators

The team focuses on the design and syntheses of bioactive small molecules, syntheses of derivatives for bioactive natural product and their functional studies, studies of interactions between small molecules and macromolecular drug targets
(Nucleic acids and proteins), as well as their biological and pharmaceutical significance.

Major research interests
(1) Studies of innovative medicines (including design and syntheses of anticancer drugs, antibacterial drugs, drugs for treating Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, diabetes, etc., and their mechanistic studies); 
(2) Studies for interactions of small molecular probes with bio-macromolecules and their regulatory mechanisms for cell functions;
(3) Studies of synthetic processes, key synthetic technologies and methods for bioactive small molecules.

Team members
The team consists of three full Professors, four Associate Professors, and more than 40 PhD and MS students. The team members have comprehensive research background in Medicinal Chemistry, Organic Synthesis, Chemical Biology, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Pharmaceutical Sciences, with extensive theoretical and practical experience. Over the years, the team has established mature domestic and international collaborations with universities, research institutes, and companies.

Facilities
The team has been fully required with instruments necessary for the researches of Medicinal Chemical Syntheses, Natural Product Chemistry, Biochemistry, Chemical Biology, and Molecular Biology.

Achievements
The team has more than 10 on-going research projects, including national natural science research grants for key project, important project, general project, and youth project, international collaboration project from Ministry of Science and Technology, national innovative medicine key project, Guangdong province and Guangzhou city key and important project, etc, with total research funding over 10 million Yuan. Our group has over 200 papers published in internationally renowned journals, and more than 20 authorized patents. Our group has made some significant progress in new drugs discovery and their mechanistic studies. We have been awarded The First Class Prize of Science and Technology from Guangdong province in 2010, and The Second Class Prize of Outstanding Achievement in Scientific Research of Higher Education in 2010. 
Our scientific achievement has got wide attention and recognition from domestic and international peers, with our paper cited for over 800 times by other researchers. One of our papers published in J. Med. Chem. in 2007, has been ranked as one of fourteen landmark research papers in the past ten years in the field of “molecular targeted cancer therapy” in 2009. One of our review papers published in ChemMedChem in 2008, has been ranked as “highly cited” and “high access” paper in three consecutive years from 2010 to 2012, and become one of papers with most attention in this magazine, with over 100 citations so far.

Technical Services：
(1) Drug Synthesis and Process Development Research.
(2) Interaction of Drug and Drug Target.
(3) Target Specific Drug Activity Screening.