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Song Erwei

Updated: 2020-11-20

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Song Erwei

Ph.D., Professor, CASM

Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital at Sun Yat-sen University, China


Song Erwei, born in 1970, is Professor of Breast Surgery at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU), CMB (China Medical Board) Distinguished Professor and Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (UK). He has been elected as Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences since November 2019. Currently, he serves as Dean of Zhongshan School of Medicine and President of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital at Sun Yat-sen University. 
Prof. Song obtained his M.D. (1995) and Ph.D. (2000) at Sun Yat-sen University, and trained as a surgeon at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, SYSU. He had his postdoc training at Essen University Hospital and Harvard Medical School from 1999 to 2004, respectively. His early publication in Nature Medicine was the first to report that siRNA could be used therapeutically in whole animal disease model, and selected as one of the "Ten breakthroughs of the year 2003" by Science. 
Prof. Song is a clinician scientist who is keen to address scientific questions derived from clinical practice. He is one of the pioneers in China to perform breast-conserving surgery for beast cancer patients, and has demonstrated that breast preservation maintains the microenvironment tissues for activation of anti-tumor immunity by subsequent conventional anti-tumor treatments. He also studies the regulatory roles of tumor microenvironment in cancer progression, and has achieved a series of original findings. For example, he has uncovered various new subtypes of cancer-associated immune cells and mesenchymal cells, and has further elaborated on their mechanisms, providing new insights for cancer immunotherapy. He has also identified new receptors of various crucial cytokines and revealed new pathways for immune regulation in microenvironment. Furthermore, he has reported a new archetype of long non-coding RNAs that function as signaling molecules to regulate intracellular or intercellular signal transduction, enriching current knowledge on the signaling networks in the tumor microenvironment. These findings have provided new therapeutic strategies for targeting tumor microenvironment as well as immunotherapies for solid tumors. 
Prof. Song has published 134 SCI research articles, including Cell (3 papers), Cancer Cell (3 papers), Nature Immunology, Nature Cell Biology, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Communications (3 papers), etc. He was invited to contribute a review article on tumor microenvironment for Nature Review Drug Discovery and chair an international Cell Symposium for Cell Press on "Functional RNAs". 
Prof. Song has served as the associate editor for BMC Cancer, Cancer Science and Science China-Life Sciences. His research work was selected as Top Ten Scientific and Technological Breakthrough by the Ministry of Education in China in 2008 and 2018, respectively. He has won numerous awards, including the "Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Award" and the "National Natural Science Award" by the State Council of China, etc.