Talk Summary:
The development of science and technology has enabled human understanding of oneself to enter the molecular level.Mapping every molecule of the cell will transform our understanding of biology and disease and could lead to major advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. As an important component of cells, the cell membrane contains a rich array of disease biomarkers and drug targets that play an extremely important and unique role in the precision medicine. Therefore, a comprehensive molecular analysis of the cell membrane surface is the foundation for achieving disease molecular typing and “facial recognition-style” multi-parameter precision diagnosis and treatment. Our team has pioneered a new method for screening nucleic acid aptamers using intact cells as screening targets, called Cell-SELEX, to address the bottleneck of a lack of effective molecular recognition tools for the cell membrane surface. This method allows for the in situ screening of multiple target molecules on living cells under unknown conditions, and has identified multiple membrane protein markers, providing targets for precision diagnosis and treatment. These aptamers have been widely applied in biomedical research, including ultra-sensitive detection of tumors, molecular imaging, and targeted drug delivery. Recently, our group has developed a new technology of translating the great power of high-throughput gene sequencing into the ability of molecular profiling of cell membrane proteins using cell-binding aptamers to map the cell membrane protein at single cell resolution. This report will introduce our important progress in using aptamers to map the molecular landscape of cell surfaceome, and explore their value in cancer molecular subtyping and precision medicine.

Presenter Biography:
Professor Weihong Tan earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1993. Currently, he is the director of Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the dean of Zhejiang Cancer Hospital. He is also the director of the State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics at Hunan University, and the director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Renji Hospital and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He served as a University Distinguished Professor and a V.T. and Louis Jackson Professor at the University of Florida for more than 20 years. Professor Tan’s research is in the area of bioanalytical chemistry, molecular medicine and chemical biology. He specializes in aptamer research, DNA nanotechnology, and cancer theranostics. Professor Tan has also been recognized as an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, Academician of the World Academy of Sciences in Developing Countries in 2016.

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