Professor Li Min and her research team from Mr and Mrs Ko Chi Ming Centre for Parkinson’s Disease Research, School of Chinese Medicine (SCM), recently attended the 1st National Congress of Autophagy held in Dalin, China, and won the Best Poster Award in this symposium. Entitled “NRBF2 is involved in the degradation process of APP-CTFs in Alzheimer disease models”, the poster presented by Dr. Chuan-bin Yang, a postdoc research fellow from Prof. Li’s group, was selected as one of the three best posters at the symposium. This work was collaborated with Dr. Jia-Hong Lu from State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau.

Autophagy is a conserved process to degrade long-lived proteins and damaged organelles mediated by lysosomes, which is involves many diseases includingneurodegerative diseases. Professor Li’s team has been actively engaged in investigation the roles of autophagy dysfunctions in neurodegenerative diseases and the identification and development of novel autophagy regulators derived from Chinese medicines for the prevention and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

Accumulating evidence indicates that autophagy plays an important role in regulating Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis. Professor Li said: “We have found that NRBF2 (nuclear receptor binding factor 2), a key component and regulator of the PtdIns3K, is crucial in regulating amyloid beta peptide (Aβ) homeostasis via modulating autophagy. Our results suggest that modulation of NRBF2 may serve as a novel potential therapeutic target for regulating Aβ homeostasis and even AD treatment. This award attests to the hard work and advances made by SCM in the field of autophagy, and neurodegenerative diseases at the advanced level.”