Jin-Feng Hu
Fudan University, China
Over the past decades, the global biodiversity has continued to decline. The threats to the terrestrial plant species have increased under anthropogenic activities and other massive ecological change impacts. The situation is much more serious in China, the third (after Brazil and Colombia) richest countries regarding plant biodiversity in the world. It was not until 1992 that the first volume of the China Plant Red Data Book (CPRDB) was published. The second volume of the CPRDB is currently under preparation and will contain hundreds of additional endangered plants. Nevertheless, plant-derived natural products have continued to play a significant role in the drug discovery and development process. The opportunity for identifying new chemical entities (NCEs) for emerging diseases depends on a diversity of drug-producing species. Recently, several statistical surveys unveiled that the rare and endangered plants have proven to be better sources for drug discovery than other botanic sources. There is an urgent need to investigate the rare and endangered plant species endemic to China. Our group has launched a new era to systematically identify bioactive/novel natural products from plants in the CPRDB. The selected rare and endangered plant species were generally collected from the remote Mountain areas, and have never been chemically or pharmacologically investigated. Due to the difficult collection of the mass-limited plant materials, studies on the secondary metabolites of the plant associated endophytes would provide a promising solution. We and our collaborators are conducting individual projects related to this overall research goal.
Jin-Feng Hu has received his PhD from Lanzhou University in 1996. He was a Post-doctoral fellow in Hans-Knoell-Institute for Natural Products Research, Germany, Department of Pharmacognosy at the University of Mississippi and Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation/The Scripps Research Institute. He left his position as a Principal Scientist in Natural Products Chemistry from Sequoia Sciences, Inc., USA in 2006 and since then has been a full Professor at East China Normal University and Chair of the Department of Natural Products, the Pharmacy School at Fudan University. He has published over 130 scientific papers, reviews, book chapters and patents.
Email: jfhu@fudan.edu.cn
