Evandro Fang gives a talk entitled ‘Accessible approaches to fight against ageing’ moderated by Trygve Holmøy. Photo: He-ling WangPanel discussion. From left: Rektor Svein Stølen, Leder Trygve Holmøy, Administrerende direktør Øystein Mæland, and Leder Campus Ahus Torbjørn Omland Photo: He-ling WangPhoto: He-ling Wang
On the 21st March 2022, a scientific birthday gathering was held for Prof. Dr. Vilhelm Bohr in celebration of his lifelong contribution to science, teaching, and mentoring. it was held on the top floor of the Maersk Tower at the Universtiy of Copenhagen. Over 10 Fang group members (and associated members) flew from Oslo and London to attend this unique event. Some pictures and videos (from Evandro Fang or his team members) are listed below for good memory.
To present the Fang lab gift to Prof. Bohr Best post award to two of the Fang lab current/former members Tomas and Bjoern Dinner invited by Prof. Bohr
Additional materials are
Prof. Dr. Vilhelm Bohr’s speech in the dinner: here
Evandro Fang’s speech in Prof. Dr. Vilhelm Bohr’s dinner: here
Evandro Fang’s question to the ageing research ‘big wigs’ on their answers to the use one to two sentences to convince to the students to choose ageing research for their career development: here
We are please to announce that the Fang group first PhD student Shu-qin CAO (co-mentoring with Prof. Tewin Tencomnao at Chula University) had successfully defended her PhD in a 3-hour meeting. The Committee unanimously scored her PhD with ‘Distinction’, a rare and the highest honor.
The Fang and Labbadia laboratories with a high caliber of international experts on ageing have published a solicited review on autophagy and healthy ageing in Nature Ageing. Synthesis of recent research on #autophagy in health, #aging and disease and discussion of how drugs that modulate the process of autophagy could be used to suppress age-associated diseases.
The complete author list: Yahyah Aman1,3†, Tomas Schmauck-Medina1†, Malene Hansen4, Richard I Morimoto5, Anna Katharina Simon6, Ivana Bjedov3,7, Konstantinos Palikaras8, Anne Simonsen9, Terje Johansen10, Nektarios Tavernarakis11,12, David C. Rubinsztein13, 14, Linda Partridge3, 15, Guido Kroemer16-20, John Labbadia3,* and Evandro F. Fang1,2,*
It has been such a wonderful, happy, memorable, and fruitful 3-year career development journey at the lovely the University of Oslo (UiO), and the Akershus University Hospital (Ahus), Oslo, Norway.
I opened the Fang Lab UiO on the 2nd Oct. 2017, one month after I finished my 5.5-year postdoc with Prof. Dr. Vilhelm A. Bohr at the National Institute on Ageing (NIA), Baltimore, USA. After only about 20 days, I had my 1st student Nica (Domenica Caponio) from southern Italy joined my group. Nica had since then became a multi-faceted member of the Fang lab: she was a Ph.D. exchange student and needed to design and run the experiments; she was the lab manager to a team of two to over 5+ in a few months, for ordering, maintenance etc; she was also a friend of me, we worked closely together hand by hand and built the lab platforms…Today, the Fang Lab is growing to be a big lab with 15+ trainees come from many different countries; within 3 years, we have students from a total of 11 countries associated with the Fang lab. And this month, we will also welcome Nica to join us as a postdoc!
The Fang lab is doing ´Molecular Mechanisms of Human Ageing and Age-related Neurodegeneration´ at international level. We have more than 10 projects going on here, covering from the molecular mechanisms of ageing, developing strategies to turning up mitophagy to forestall memory loss in Alzheimer´s disease (AD), to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify lead compounds for healthy longevity and AD. In the past three years, the Fang Lab has published over 10 papers, including papers in Nature Neuroscience(Fang EF et al., 2019), Cell Metabolism(Lautrup et al., 2019), and Ageing Research Reviews (Fang EF et al., 2020). The Fang lab has also been very successful in securing external funding from Norway (e.g., HSØ, RCN), EU (e.g., Marie Curie, KAPPA (Czech Republic-Norway joint grant, ranked 2nd over a total of 154 grants), and China (e.g., NSFC). The Fang lab is actively doing ´bench-top to bed-side´research: in collaboration with clinicians, the Fang lab is going to lead one NAD+-based clinical trial, and has been participated as a key member in 5+ NAD+ clinical trials. The Fang lab is very active in National and International ageing societies as Dr. Fang is a major player of the NO-Age network, the NO-AD network, the Hong Kong-Nordic Research Network, and the NO-Age and NO-AD Seminar Series, a new editor of the leading ageing journal Ageing Research Reviews (and other journals), and has been given over 50 talks in national/international meetings and in leading research universities worldwide. The Fang lab discoveries have been recognized by DKNVS and other prestigious scientific societies, and have been reported in national and international main-stream media, including the Norwegian largest Newspaper VG.
Invited by UiO, today I also gave a talk on ´Independent Career Development´to share my personal experience to the postdocs and young researchers who are on the stage of developing their independent careers. The video is here.
The achievements of the Fang Lab are contributed by each and every former and current members of the Fang Lab! I thank my former postdoc mentor and friend Prof. Vilhelm A. Bohr, and my career mentors and collaborators Profs. Hilde L. Nilsen, Jon Storm-Mathisen, and Linda H. Bergersen, and my many national and international collaborators and friends for their continued and unconditioned supports and helps.
I am looking forward to working with the current and new members of the Fang Lab, and collaborators, to make new breakthroughs in both basic research and in drug development!
Fang Lab 2nd Scientific Retreat 2020.07.15-2020.07.19 A 5-day trip in the 3rd largest city, Stavanger, Norway with Paweł Strychalski, Shu, Evandro Fang, Rina, and Yahyah Aman (L to R)
Prof. Vilhelm Bohr from the National Institute on Ageing (USA) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) is the laureate of this 2020 Thon International Research Award.
Prof. Ole Petter Ottersen, president of the Thon Foundation, Vice-Chancellor (president) of Karolinska Institute, and former rector (president) of the University of Oslo (UiO), presents the prestigious award to Prof. Bohr. The quote from one International evaluator says, ‘That by any scientific standards within the areas of ageing, gerontology, and related changes to the brain, it is difficult to see any candidate that would be more suitable for the price than him’.
The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS) is the oldest Academy in Norway. This year´s Gunnerus Medal, the highest medal of honor by DKNVS, goes to the Academy members May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser. The Mosers were the 2014 Nobel Laureates for Medicine or Physiology, for their discovery of the grid cells, a group of neurons in our brain enabling one finds the way back home.
The DKNVS’s scientific award to younger researchers this year goes to Heidrun Åm (Social Science) and Evandro Fei Fang (Medical fields). The two researchers receive NOK 75,000 each.
1. Why does people with Alzheimer’s sleep more during the day? How does it affect sleeping routines? EFF: It has been well documented that sleep-wake disturbance is a common and early feature in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). If one does not have a good sleep at night, then it is common to see a possibility of additional power naps of AD patients at daytime. This study led by Dr. Lea T. Grinberg at UCSF showed profound degeneration of wake-promoting neurons in AD. This explains why AD patients sleep more during the day, possibly as a compensation of disturbed normal sleep at night. Thus, increased power naps greatly affect sleeping routines and are negative to people’s daily life.
2. Could you tell me about what you find most interesting in this study, and why? EFF: The key finding in this study is a proposed new explanation of sleep-wake disturbances in the AD patients. Thus, this finding may provide an additional phenotypical diagnostic standard for early AD patients. However, increased power naps is not specific to AD, thus other phenotypic and pathological diagnostic tools should be jointed used for AD diagnosis.
Image: Dagbladet pluss. Online: https://www.dagbladet.no/pluss (15 August 2019 issue) Tusen Takk to the awesome journalist Ida Bergersen
Congratulations to postdocs Guofeng Lou and Sofie Lautrup for their fresh Ópinion´ review paper in the Trends in Molecular Medicine
Highlights
Mitophagy, an evolutionally conserved cellular self-degradation of damaged mitochondria, is impaired in major neurodegenerative diseases, including AD, PD, ALS, FTD, and HD.
Defective mitophagy in postmortem brain samples from AD patients and in AD animal models is caused by several mechanisms, including by the inhibition of the ULK1/TBK1-dependent initiation of the mitophagic machinery via Tau/Aβ proteinopathies.
In mice and rhesus monkeys, PINK1 deletion does not induce significant mitophagy impairment at physiological conditions, suggesting a compensatory response by other mitophagy pathways. Studies in the rhesus monkeys also suggest the existence of none–mitophagy–regulatory role(s) of PINK1.
Therapeutic strategies targeting on mitophagy induction ameliorate disease pathology and inhibit neuronal loss in both AD and PD mouse models.
Abstract
Neurodegenerative diseases are strongly age-related and currently cannot be cured, with a surge of patient numbers in the coming decades in view of the emerging worldwide ageing population, bringing healthcare and socioeconomic challenges. Effective therapies are urgently needed, and are dependent on new aetiological mechanisms. In neurons, efficient clearance of damaged mitochondria, through the highly evolutionary conserved cellular process termed mitophagy, plays a fundamental role in mitochondrial and metabolic homeostasis, energy supply, neuronal survival, and health. Conversely, defective mitophagy leads to accumulation of damaged mitochondria and cellular dysfunction, contributing to ageing and age-predisposed neurodegeneration. Here, we discuss the contribution of defective mitophagy in these diseases, and underlying molecular mechanisms, and highlight novel therapeutics based on new discovered mitophagy-inducing strategies.
Evandro Fang Lab 