【直播】【KeAi Talks】Mitochondrial Communications系列讲座第七场

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Biography

Dr. Bohr’s early professional training took place at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where he earned an MD in 1978, and PhD and DSc degrees in 1987. After training in neurology and infectious diseases at the University Hospital in Copenhagen, he undertook postdoctoral studies in Biochemistry at the university. In 1992, he was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in the US.

Throughout his career, Dr. Bohr has advanced understanding of DNA repair pathways and mechanisms and the cellular response to oxidative DNA damage and oxidative stress. He has been especially interested in the repair and function of the mitochondrial genome. Early in his career, he developed a widely-used method for studying DNA repair in the transcribed portion of the genome and found that transcriptionally-active genes are preferentially repaired through a process now known as transcription-coupled nucleotide excision repair (TC-NER). The discovery of TC-NER provided strong evidence of the tight interaction between the cellular machineries for DNA repair and transcription in mammalian cells.

His recent studies have resulted in seminal findings about the relationships between DNA damage, DNA repair capacity and aging-associated neurodegeneration, and he has proposed important models describing crosstalk between the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, as well as the importance of energy homeostasis/imbalance and mitochondrial dysfunction in aging-related neurodegenerative disease. He and his colleagues found that NAD levels are lower in diseases with deficient DNA repair leading to mitochondrial dysfunction. Intervention with NAD supplementation has shown excellent benefits in mice and other model systems of neurodegeneration and DNA repair deficits including Alzheimer’s disease.

Biography

Dr. Fang is an Associate Professor of Molecular Gerontology at the University of Oslo (UiO), Norway. His group studies the molecular mechanisms of human ageing and age-predisposed neurodegeneration. More specifically, the Fang laboratory focuses on the molecular mechanisms that help cells clear their damaged and aged mitochondria, a process termed “mitophagy”, as well as the roles of the NAD+-mitophagy/autophagy axis in healthy ageing and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) inhibition. NAD+ is a fundamental molecule in life and health and decreases in ageing and AD. Dr Fang is fascinated with and actively engaged in moving his laboratory findings to translational applications and is involved in more than five NAD+-based clinical trials, with the overarching goal of establishing novel and safe biological approaches to promote longer and healthier human lives.

After finishing his PhD at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he had a six-year postdoc training with Prof. Vilhelm Bohr on molecular gerontology at the National Institute on Ageing in the US. He opened his lab in Oslo in the fall of 2017.

He has published over 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals including Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature Reviews MCB, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Ageing, and Nature Biomedical Engineering. He has received several awards, including the Butler-Williams Scholar on Aging 2016 from NIA (USA) and the Scientific Award to Young Scientist in the Natural Sciences for 2020 from The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (Norway). He is the founding (co)coordinator of the Norwegian Centre on Healthy Ageing network (NO-Age), the Norwegian National anti-Alzheimer’s disease Network (NO-AD) and the Hong Kong-Nordic Research Network.

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