From studying piano to studying the brain, Li Wenyu has won two Nobel Prize in science, and her results bring hope to neurodegenerative diseases

Every year in September, the Citation Laureate Award, the Scientific Breakthrough Award, and the Lasker Prize are awarded one after another, and many of the winners of these science prizes have won the Nobel Prize later, so these awards are also known as the "Nobel Prize weathervane"
.

Karl Deisseroth (winner for optogenetics), who has won these "Nobel Prize vanes" in recent years, and Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman (winner for mRNA technology), have become popular prediction candidates for
the Nobel Prize.

On September 21, 2022, Clarivate announced the list of citation laurels for 2022, and Virginia Man-Yee Lee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, received an award in
physiology or medicine.

Li Wenyu

Prior to this, Li Wenyu also won the 2020 Scientific Breakthrough Award for the discovery of TDP43 protein aggregation in frontotemporal dementia (FTLD) and Frostbite (ALS) and revealed that different forms of α-synuclein (α-Syn) in different cell types are the basis for
Parkinson's disease (PD) and multisystem atrophy (MSA).

Li Wenyu at the award ceremony of the Scientific Breakthrough Award

Li Wenyu was born in Chongqing in 1945, which is also the origin
of her name "Yu".

After graduating from the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1964, Li Wenyu switched to science, obtaining a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a master's degree in biochemistry from
the University of London.

After that, Li Wenyu went to the United States and obtained a doctorate degree in the laboratory of Li Zhuohao of the University of California, San Francisco, Li Zhuohao (1913-1987) is a famous Chinese scientist, who has long been engaged in the research, synthesis and medical application of human growth hormone, and discovered and synthesized human growth hormone for the first time in the world, known as the "father of hormones"
.

During his PhD studies in Li Zhuohao's laboratory, Li Wenyu received outstanding training
in biochemistry fields such as protein extraction and protein purification.

While a postdoc at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, Li met her future husband, John Trojanowski
.

John Trojanowski (left), Li Wenyu (right)

After leaving the postdoctoral program, Li Wenyu worked for a pharmaceutical company for two years
.

As she said in her acceptance speech: "I would like to be eternally grateful to John Trojanowski, my partner and long-time collaborator, who not only taught me neuropathology, but also inspired me to take on the ambitious challenge
of identifying disease proteins in neurodegenerative diseases.

Since conducting independent research at the University of Pennsylvania, Li Wenyu has published a large number of research papers and made a series of breakthrough discoveries
.

Data from Google Scholar

In 1991, Li Wenyu published a paper in Science [1], which first confirmed that the specific protein A68 in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients is the phosphorylated form
of the tau protein.

In 1998, Li Wenyu published a paper in Science [2] identifying exon and inton mutations
in more than 10 tau genes in the families of chromosome 17-linked frontotemporal dementia and Parkinson's disease (FTLD-17).

In 2000, Li Wenyu published a paper in Science [3] and found that the nitrification modification of α-synuclein (α-Syn) is associated
with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease, Lewy body dementia, and Alzheimer's disease.

In 2003, Li Wenyu published a paper in Science [4] that found that the interaction of tau protein with α-synuclein (α-Syn) promotes the fibrosis of proteins, thereby driving the pathological symptoms
of neurodegenerative diseases in humans.

In 2006, Wenyu Li published a paper in Science [5] in which he first discovered the role
of TDP-43 protein in frontotemporal dementia (FTLD) and Frostbite (ALS).

In 2012, Li Wenyu published a paper in Science [6], confirming that synthetic α-synucleoprotein fibrils can spread from cell to cell after injection into the brains of normal mice, and cause Parkinson-like neurodegeneration in mice
.

In 2018, Li Wenyu published a paper in Nature [7], which found that in Lewy body diseases (including Parkinson's disease, dementia, Lewy body dementia, etc.
) and multisystem atrophy (MSA), there is α-synuclein (α-Syn) aggregation in the brain cells of patients, but the structure and nature of these α-Syn are not the same, suggesting that different modifications of α-Syn in different cellular environments lead to different types of
neurodegenerative diseases.

The series of research results of Li Wenyu's team have laid an important foundation
for the pathogenesis and treatment of various neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), frontotemporal dementia (FTLD), and Frostbite (ALS).
These findings are also being translated into therapeutic targets for diseases, for example, companies such as AC Immune and SOLA Biosciences are developing antibodies or small molecule drugs that target TDP-43 and α-Syn for the treatment of diseases
such as frontotemporal dementia (FTLD) and Frostbite (ALS).

Thesis Links:

1.
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