Prof. Dr. Yuewei Guo’s group is the only group in SIMM dedicating to search for bioactive compounds from South China Sea marine fauna (mainly sponges, soft corals) and flora (algae, mangroves etc.). Since year 2000 when my group was established, I and my colleagues have long been being engaged in the exploration of South China Sea marine biodiversity with the purpose to find leads or improved drugs for the treatment of human diseases. These years our continued efforts on the studies of South China Sea marine organism with the financial support from Chinese government had resulted in the discovery of numerous marine natural products, spanning a wide range of structure classes and various biogenetic origins. Particularly interesting is that many marine natural products we isolated exhibited interesting pharmacological activities, implying great pharmaceutical application potential. These years our research results have resulted in the publication of 190 scientific papers on reputed international journals such as Chem Rev, Nat Prod Rep, Org Lett, J Org Chem, Org Bioorg Chem, Eur J Org Chem, Tetrahedron, J Nat Prod, etc. More than 40 patents were also applied, and 26 of which were officially approved. In addition, five awards including Debio-CCRF China Prize (2007, 1st prize) and Paul-Scheuer-Award (2010) were obtained.

EDUCATION
09/1978-07/1982  Dept. of Pharmacy Beijing University of Chinese Traditional Medicine Beijing, China Academic degree obtained: Bachelor of Science
09/1985-07/1988  Dept. of Pharmacy China Pharmaceutical University Nanjing, China Academic degree obtained: Master of Science Title of the thesis: Chemical studies on plant Isodon parvifolia
09/1994-09/1997  Faculty of Pharmacy University of Naples “Federico II”/ICMIB-CNR Naples, Italy Academic degree obtained: Ph.D. major in Natural Products Chemistry Title of the thesis: Chemical Studies of Novel Bioactive Metaboplites from the Benthic Invertebrate: Isolation and Structure Characterization
10/1997-03/1999  Istituto per la Chimica di Molecule di Interesse Biologico-CNR Naples, Italy Position: Post Doctor

EXPERIENCE
02/1993-07/1988  Dept. of Nat. Prod. Chem. Nanjing Institute of Materia Medica Nanjing, China Position: Assistant professor
03/1993-12/1993  Sales dept. of Lizhu Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Zhuhai, China Position: Sales manager
01/1994-08/1994  ICMIB-CNR Position: Visiting scholar
09/1994-09/1997  University of Naples/ICMIB-CNR Napoli, Italy Position： Ph.D.
09/1997-03/2000  ICMIB-CNR Naples, Italy Position： Post Doctor
06/2000-02/2001  Hokkaido University Sapporo, Japan Position： Visiting Professor
04/2000-Present   SIMM-CAS Position： Professor Shanghai, China

1.Isolation and structural determination of secondary metabolites with promising bioactivities from South China Sea marine invertebrates, flora.
2.Chemistry and chemo-ecology studies on molluscas and their dietary organisms.

I am currently as the editorial member of international SCI journals, such as “Marine Drugs”, "The Open Organic Chemistry Journal", etc. and as the editorial member of national journals, such as "Chinese Journal of Natural Medicines", "Natural Product Research and Development", "International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research", etc.

12/2011 Yue-Wei Guo,Wen Zhang,Xu Shen,Jia Li,Shui-Chun Mao,Yan Li,Jian-Rong Wang Chemoecology and bioactivity studies on the South China sea mollusks and their food source organisms, Shanghai Pharmaceutical Association,shanghai pharmaceutical science and technology award,1st prize.
08/2012 Yue-Wei Guo,Wen Zhang,Xu Shen,Jia Li,Shui-Chun Mao,Yan Li,Jian-Rong Wang Chemistry and chemical ecology of South China Sea opisthobranchs and their dietary organisms, China Pharmaceutical Association，China pharmaceutical science and technology award,3rd prize.
06/2010 Yue-Wei Guo, Paul-Scheuer-Award, Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften Zu Erfurt

1.Specific hypotheses addressed by my research work
Respect to terrestrial natural resources that have been being intense research subjects for drug discovery, marine organisms, especially benthic invertebrates (sponges, corals, etc.) relatively received less attention from natural product chemists and pharmacologists as well. However, this situation has been changed remarkably since 1970’s, when many structurally intriguing, biologically promising compounds were isolated from various marine fauna and flora by scientists of mainly U.S., Europe and Japan. In the field of marine natural products research, China is a latter-coming and less active player even though China has a very long history to use marine organisms to treat various diseases. Fortunately, Chinese government has realized the importance to explore marine resource for developing useful products (mainly marine drugs) and the underdeveloped situation of China in the field. Since year 1990, Chinese government has launched several projects, namely “863” projects, to support scientists carrying out marine natural products research. In the frame of this project, we proposed a project entitled “Search for Novel Bioactive Compounds from Chinese Benthic Invertebrate”was approved in year 2000 when I came back to China joining SIMM from abroad. The basic idea/hypothesis of the proposed project is that the marine environment respect to that of land is even worse and marine organisms competing for food and spaces are more strict than species living on the land. In order to survive in marine, marine organisms, particularly marine invertebrates, are forced to produce some chemical substances (secondary metabolites) to defend themselves and to prevent from preying by other potential predators. The marine secondary metabolites compared to those from terrestrial organisms have following advantages:
(1) structure unique and complex
(2) bioactivity strong and very efficient It is believed that new revolutionary drug (like penicillin, etc.) may occur with great possibility from the marine organisms in the future. These years in the course of our continued searching for bioactive compounds from South China Sea marine organisms, we did find that South China Sea possess a great biodiversity and a great chemical diversity as well.

2.Major findings
We have collected 650 marine organisms (sponges, soft corals, etc.) and more than 300 marine collections were chemically investigated in the last decade. In the course of this study we were able to isolated more than 1700 marine natural products sparing a wide range of structural classes and various biogenetic origins. The research results we obtained have resulted in the publication of 190 papers on international journals. More than 40 patents were also applied and 26 of which have been approved officially. In addition, I also wrote or co-edited eight books or book chapters and I’m more than 40 times invited to present our work on many international conferences as plenary or invited speaker.

3.Describe how our work contributed to our research field
Our research work not only provide quite a lot hit, lead compounds for drug discovery, but also provide many useful information or knowledge about the biology, chemistry, chemo-ecology of South China Sea marine organisms from a scientific point of view. Our research work (our contributions) to the field has attracted considerable the attention of international community and have promoted the development of marine natural product research. Chinese marine natural product research team is now an underestimate force.