Yong Xu

Professor, Dean

School of Life Sciences and Biopharmaceutics, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University

Short Biography

Yong Xu serves as Professor, Doctoral Supervisor and Dean of the School of Life Sciences and Biopharmaceutics at Guangdong Pharmaceutical University. He is a recipient of the Hundred Talents Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Principal Investigator of national key R&D programs, and Distinguished Expert of Guangzhou High-level Talents. Prof. Xu holds multiple academic positions including Director of the Medicinal Chemistry Committee of Guangdong Pharmaceutical Association and Vice Director of Guangdong Key Laboratory of Biomedical Computation, and serves as a reviewer for national key R&D programs and NSFC projects. 
His research focuses on novel therapeutic target validation and first-in-class small-molecule drug discovery. To tackle unmet clinical needs in malignant tumors, he has established a comprehensive, interdisciplinary research platform that integrates AI-driven drug design, medicinal chemistry, structural biology, and translational pharmacology. His team has long been committed to targeted protein degradation, successfully developing small-molecule degraders against disease-relevant targets such as CBP, BRD9, and GSPT1. To date, Prof. Xu has published over 130 high-impact papers in leading journals including Nature Medicine and Cell Research, with total citations exceeding 6,000. His systematic research on oncogenic targets and lead compound development provides robust theoretical and technical support for advancing targeted protein degraders from oncology to autoimmune disease treatment.

Presentation Topic: Advances in the Development of Targeted Protein Degraders: From Oncology to Autoimmunity

• Elaborate on the core mechanism of targeted protein degradation, summarize the molecular design strategies, target landscape and clinical pipeline progress of anti-tumor degraders, and illustrate their therapeutic merits and developmental bottlenecks in solid tumors and hematological malignancies

• Present data on lead molecule screening, cellular assays and in vivo model evaluation of novel tumor-targeted degraders against CBP, BRD9, GSPT1, RORγ and other targets

• Present data on the development of VAV1 immunoinflammatory target degraders, along with their pharmacodynamic verification