Qiang Feng, PhD

Vice-Director of Beijing Genomics Institute at Shenzhen (BGI-Shenzhen)

FENG Qiang PhD, Vice-Director of Beijing Genomics Institute at Shenzhen (BGI-Shenzhen), PhD from University of Copenhagen on the subject of Metagenomics. His scientific interests include human commensal microbiome and complex diseases, as a team leader, his team has constructed and improved a series of association analysis methods and pipelines on metagenomics correlated with human diseases. These methods and pipelines have been used in a group of studies on metagenomic-related disorders, especially metabolic syndromes, and published on top scientific journals like Nature and Science. Also, he and his team have launched a study about the intervention effect of 100 Chinese foods and herbal medicines on gut microbiota, they are trying to construct the relationships of “food/herbal medicine-gut microbiota-phenotypes”. Now, some results from this study have already been used in development of disease prevention, health management and functional food products. Another achievement from FENG’s team is the establishment of a human gut microbiota resource library, including the complete pipeline from bacteria isolation, culture to identification and application. This library contains more than 15000 human gut bacteria now, probiotics chosen from this library were used to be combined as a “cocktail” in treatment of UC mice and volunteered UC patients, which were both quite effective. Human gut microbiome testing products is another application FENG’s team are working on, which should be helpful in the development of precise medicine and personal health management. Finally, the routine jobs of FENG and his team also include building integrated reference catalog of the human gut microbiome (IGC), as well as construction gut microbiome reference catalogs for other mammals (e.g. mice, pig, etc.), which could be a great basis for further scientific research and product development.

FENG has published more than 30 SCI papers on top scientific journals, 10 as first author or communication author. He also involved in writing of Chinese text books like “Bone science” and “Molecular biology of genes”. 75 patents from his team have been applied all over the world, some are authorized. As a PI, FENG presided projects with a total grant more than 1.5 million USD, including 10+ national 863 and 973 projects. He has participated several international research projects as well, e.g. MetaHIT, IHMS and MetaPIG. The outstanding work from him and his team on type 2 diabetes has been named as “Top 10 achievements in Chinese T2D studies” on 2012.