Prof.  Limin  Chen
Peking Union medical college, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences,  China

Title: Will emerging infectious disease outbreaks endanger blood safety?

Abstract:

Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases are spreading in the whole or some parts of the world to cause pandemics or epidemics. In the past decades, we have been experiencing pandemic such as COVID-19 and epidemics such as Dengue fever and Chikungunya virus infection, which brought huge medical and economical burden to the whole world or to the epidemic areas. In this presentation, I will talk recent outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging infectious pathogens in the past decade and discuss whether they will endanger blood safety. In the meantime, how can we prepare for the unexpected pandemics/epidemics to ensure blood safety, including novel pathogen inactivation/reduction and visualized POCT technologies will also be discussed.

Biography:

Dr. Limin Chen, a professor with Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS)/Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) and also an affiliate scientist with the University of Toronto, Canada now is the director and chief scientific officer of the center for transfusion transmitted infectious diseases, Institute of Blood Transfusion (IBT), CAMS/PUMC,Member of the American Association for Studies of Liver Diseases (AASLD) and Canadian Association for Studies of Liver (CASL). He got his MD, MSc in biochemistry and molecular biology in China, PhD in molecular genetics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Chen obtained his postdoctoral training both at Merck Research Laboratories, Merck & Co. Inc (West Point, PA, USA) and at the Harvard Medical School (MGH) . Currently Dr. Chen’s research focuses on the virus-host interaction of the transfusion-transmitted viruses, especially on emerging and er-emerging infectious pathogens. He pioneered the work on identification of the response signature to predict treatment response using HCV/HBV as an model and proposed a novel mechanism on how virus exploits host innate immune response to benefit its persistent infection and resistance to interferon-based therapy.