IICS Held Public Lecture Series and the 50th Confucius PhD Student Forum

The UCD Irish Institute for Chinese Studies (IICS) held a public lecture and the 50th Confucius PhD Student Forum on 9 February 2023. The keynote lecture was delivered by Professor Sanbing Shen from the Regenerative Medicine Institute (REMEDI) at the School of Medicine, University of Galway (UOG). The forum was held simultaneously via hybrid methods, where nearly 100 people attended. The lecture was opened by Liming Wang, Director at UCD Confucius Institute and Irish Institute for Chinese Studies.

With the theme of "Human Stem Cells and Genome Editing for Chinese Medicine", Professor Sanbing Shen used the knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine as a starting point to talk about the reasons and motivations that inspired him to carry out the relevant research, and to explain in depth the prospects of how the combination of Chinese medicine and stem cell research can treat human diseases.

According to Professor Shen, Chinese medicine has been benefiting the Chinese people for over 5000 years, and research into the identification and purification of its effective ingredients is an important complement to western medical systems. Today, human stem cell and gene editing studies provide a unique opportunity for developing Chinese medicine, while libraries of small molecules are yet to be constructed from Chinese herbs. It is believed that international collaborative research shall help further development of Chinese medicine and the development of combinatorial therapy of Chinese and regenerative medicine will benefit the global human kind.

The presentation was followed by a lively discussion with the audience on the specific utility of the research as applied to genetic diseases such as diabetes, and its effective treatment mechanisms.