Dr. Yuan Shuofeng Awarded Excellent Young Scientists Fund 2023

Dr. Yuan Shuofeng, a principal investigator of CVVT and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the LKS Faculty of Medicine, HKU, has been recognized for his exceptional work with the Prestigious Excellent Young Scientists Fund. This fund, granted under the National Natural Science Foundation of China and managed by the Ministry of Science and Technology, supports young male scientists under 38 and young female scientists under 40 who have demonstrated outstanding achievements in their research fields.

Dr Yuan’s research focus on high throughput antiviral drug discovery and uncovering of novel druggable targets. He has made conceptual breakthrough that defines the roles of host lipogenic modulator SREBP and trafficking protein AP2M1 for broad-spectrum antiviral therapy. Dr Yuan will employ two strategies to systematically identify novel druggable sites for antiviral development: (1) to integrate the state-of-the-art fragment-based screening, chemical proteomics, and a surrogate ‘mini-replicon’ assay to explore druggable sites during RdRp-nsp7-nsp8 assembly and transcription/replication activities; and (2) to utilize CRISPR knockout screening and a fluorescent recombinant SARS-CoV-2 to identify novel host-dependent and -restriction factors for antiviral therapy.