Chair Prof. Ying Xu (AAAS Fellow and IEEE Fellow)

Southern University of Science and Technology, China

Ying Xu is a Chair Professor in the School of Medicine, Southern University of Science and Technology, China since January 2023. He is also a Cheungkong Scholar Chair Professor (2008 -) and Qianren Chair Professor (2012 -). Before that, he was a Regent Professor and the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Chair in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2003 – 2022/12) and the Founding Director of the Institute of Bioinformatics, the University of Georgia, USA (2003-2011). He is an AAAS Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He has been a computational biologist since 1993 when he joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to take part in the Human Genome Project, where he worked for ten years and moved up the career ladder from a research associate to a senior staff scientist and group leader. He has published over 400 research papers and five books, including the world's first monograph “Cancer Bioinformatics”. His H-Index is 73 with more than 21000 citations in scholar.google. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from the University of Colorado in 1991 and earlier degrees from Jilin University, China.

Speech Title:"Studies of Cancer in the Big-Data Age"

Abstract: The ability of generating large quantities of omic data of cancer tissues provided unprecedented opportunities for cancer researchers to study cancer evolution in a realistic setting. Here I present a computational study of cancer drivers and key mechanisms at the chemistry imbalance level guided by information derived from omic data analyses and modeling. Cancer generally has considerable changes in their cellular chemical conditions such as the pH and the O2 level, which result in changes in the cellular physical conditions, including the membrane potential and the intracellular polarity. These changes will profoundly alter the kinetics and thermodynamics of cellular chemical reactions, leading to the so-called metabolic reprogramming (MR) at a systems level, created by stress-induced genetic mutations and epigenetic alterations for survival. The affected cells may have to make drastic and fundamental changes, such as the significant simplification of their polarity system (which defines what a cell can and cannot do) via mutations as in cancer, to generate sustained metabolic exits for the newly created MRs, which give rise to specific phenotypes of a cancer. To elucidate the operating principles of cancer, or specifically how biological functions encoded in our genome behave in a fundamentally novel physicochemical microenvironment, we need to have a new research framework, which requires, at least, consideration of biology at the basic chemistry level.