The future of medicine in China with Jay Siegel

The recent past has seen huge leaps in medicine and its contributions to humanity. Vaccinations, antibiotics, and numerous drugs have improved our lives and increased life spans. Research from Alexander Flemming led to the development of penicillin which has saved over 100 million lives around the world. In the US, before a vaccine was made available in 1971, 3-4 million people contracted the measles every year, thousands were hospitalized and hundreds died. These are just two examples from a very long list of drugs that have made dramatic impacts upon humanity and while their benefits are easily recognized and appreciated, it's also worth understanding the process that leads to their creation.

Not so long ago, chemists and experts screened and experimented in various ways to find drugs. Penicillin as an example was virtually discovered by accident when Flemming noticed a petri dish was not showing bacterial growth due to a mold contamination. That mold's properties were studied to learn it was penicillium and the antibiotic Penicillin was created. Today's medicinal research has grown a lot more complex with the introduction of big data and so many specialized fields of study. According to Jay Siegel, Dean of Pharmaceutical Science at Tianjin University "The drug industry is much more of a huge cooperative effort so you need some people who are making molecules, some people who are testing those just at the enzyme level, some people who are understanding the biology of animals so that they know what kind of tests they need to do, some people that are taking that into the clinic. You may need ten different teams working together to take a molecule and turn it into a drug that is safe and can be marketed."

All the complexities involved in this process are well understood by Siegel, and his research and past work have made him one of the mostly highly regarded chemists worldwide. It's not so common outside the world of academia for the rest of us to know the names or story behind such people, nor their amazing projects. However, Siegel is a fellow Tianjin Expat doing some incredible things here and understanding who he is and how he is contributing to pharmaceutical research is a story worth sharing.

Jay Siegel is a distinguished expert in the field of Medicinal Chemistry. He earned his PHD in Chemistry from Princeton University with emphasis in the fields of Stereochemistry and Structural Chemistry. His past experience includes acting as a visiting professor at top Universities such as Caltech, and he was also a professor at UC San Diego for fourteen years. Before coming to Tianjin, Siegel was a Dean, Director, and Professor at the University of Zurich for 10 years. He is the author of three books and more than 170 high level Journal papers. In 2011 he was named as one of the "1000 Talents" in China, and by June of 2013 Jay was heading the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology here at Tianjin University.

It has been four years now since Siegel started his project to create a world-class pharmaceutical program at Tianjin University, and by all accounts everything has been coming together in the same way many had envisioned. There is now a staff of over 25 international experts in various related fields, all coming from different countries around the globe. Siegel was also appointed Dean of the Life Sciences department and combined the related disciplines so students could cooperate and work together. A super computer was designed from scratch by a foreign expert and has been put into use exclusively for his departments. All labs and equipment were also set-up by experts from the respective fields, and Siegel said it best "Everything here was made by scientists for scientists."

What exists today is a school containing various scientific fields focused on the broader vision of drug discovery and development. Labs, professors, equipment and classes have been carefully put together to create an academic environment that is the first of its kind in China. Under the direction of Siegel, Tianjin University has become a prestigious place to study Pharmaceutical Science. From day one of an undergrad all the way through doctorate, all courses are conducted in English. This also makes the program ready to attract bright English speaking students from around the world.

One of the other unique aspects about this program is the mix of Chinese and Western philosophy for doing such research. Siegel pointed out some of the differences he has noticed:

"What we're learning here in China which is very cool, is that Eastern culture is much more of a systems analysis. They see something as holistic, and the removal of a piece makes it no longer what it used to be, but instead two pieces that may be nothing and have lost something. In Western culture we assume that if we have an inventory of all the pieces that we will know what things are and their functionality, everything is very reductionist. Now with the advent of fast super computers, information theories, and AI, we can tackle problems that are much more complex, interdependent, and interactive in the way they evolve that we couldn't do before. Western models had to break everything down into little pieces because the models could only handle little pieces. In the East they inherently couldn't break things down because the philosophy was based on something that was far too interdependent and complex. Now with the new information age of big data and AI, we can bring those (philosophies) together and can have the best reductionist aspects of the West and the best holistic aspects of the East.

On an application level, Siegel also hopes to take traditional Chinese medicine that has been used for thousands of years without understanding and bring it to a level of understanding where the knowledge can be used for the development of drugs based on traditional medicine.

Siegel's passion for his job goes beyond his interest in the East West dynamic of research, and many have questioned his inspiration and motivation to leave such lovely places as San Diego or Zurich and come to Tianjin. Siegel's candid explanation is that his work plateaus and he needs new challenges. For him, China is the future for many things and he wanted to be a part of it. "It's a new lifestyle, new language, new culture, and it's a new government. To negotiate all of those things in order to bring to fruition your dream of how an educational institution should look is a great opportunity. On the earth this is only going to happen in the history of human kind a limited number of times, so how many people in the history of humanity are going to get the opportunity to take a shot at something like this."

Siegel's work and contributions to the world of academia and medicine are now pushing China and Tianjin University to the forefront. Just as he is excited about being in China, we can all be excited about what the future will bring from his Chinese project. Perhaps these are the seeds being sewn that will create new breakthroughs in the Pharmaceutical world, all having started with big ideas in Tianjin.