Xiaosong Gu, MD, PhD

Professor Xiaosong Gu is the director of the Jiangsu Key Lab of Neuroregeneration of Ministry of Education. He is an academic leader of the priority discipline of basic medical science in Jiangsu province, and the winner of the first National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. During the past 30 years, he has led an active research team to make outstanding innovations and achievements in the fields of tissue engineering and nerve regeneration. In brief, (1) he proposed an academic point of view on “construction of biodegradable tissue engineered nerves”, which, as a novel concept, has been also mentioned in a new textbook published by the University of Cambridge Press. (2) He creates tissue engineered nerves with good biomechanical properties, controllable degradation kinetics, less immunogenicity, pro-angiogenic activity, and a capacity of supporting directional nerve growth, and he also invented a novel fabrication technology for tissue engineered nerves. (3) He developed chitosan-based artificial nerve grafts and launched, for the first time worldwide, their translation into the clinic, where the patients receiving this therapy have shown a significant functional recovery of injured nerves with an excellent rate of 85%. A series of research works by Gu, and his coworkers greatly contributed to pushing China to the world’s forefront in tissue engineered nerve research and its application. A report in the special section of Science (2012) indicated that his team was among the first in the world to develop nerve grafts using chitosan, a material usually derived from shrimp or crab shells, and the first to take such grafts to the clinic, and further praised Gu as a translational pioneer.

Gu holds 12 Chinese-domestic invention patents and 5 international invention patents and has published academic articles in SCI-indexed journals, which have been cited by such top journals as Cell, Science, and Nature Materials. Gu has won the first place in the National Technological Invention Award class II of China, provincial and ministerial awards class I and II, and Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Science and Technology Progress Award (2014).

Gu is honorary president of the Chinese Society for Anatomical Sciences and vice president of the Chinese Society of Biomedical Engineering. Moreover, he was duly elected a member of the CAE in 2015.

Honorary Editor-in-Chief
Terms of Appointment: June 2019 - May 2024;  June 2024 - May 2026