About Furong Laboratory

Furong Laboratory

Furong Laboratory is a Hunan provincial laboratory for medical research based in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, built on the Xiangya medical system of Central South University. It is one of the four pillar laboratories of Hunan Province, alongside the Yuelushan Laboratory, the Xiangjiang Laboratory and the Yuelu Mountain Laboratory, and it carries the province's precision-medicine mission: its stated ambition, in Central South University's words, is to explore precision medicine in China and to build a strategic scientific and technological force that reflects the national will, fulfils national missions and represents the national level. The laboratory is directed by Chen Xiang, executive vice president of Central South University and dean of the Xiangya School of Medicine, and its name appears as an affiliation and as a funding source across a growing clinical and population-health literature produced by the Xiangya hospitals and schools.

The Xiangya foundation

Furong Laboratory rests on one of the oldest and most famous medical institutions in China. The Xiangya School of Medicine was jointly established in 1914 by the Hunan Yuqun Society and the Yale-China Association, making it China's first medical school based on international collaboration, while Xiangya Hospital traces to the clinic opened in Changsha in 1906 by the Yale-China physician Edward H. Hume. Xiangya Hospital and Peking Union Medical College were honoured in 1922 as the two best medical institutions in China, giving rise to the saying "in the South Xiangya, in the North Union". The hospital today is a 3,500-bed teaching hospital of the National Health Commission at 87 Xiangya Road in Changsha's Kaifu District, and the Xiangya system — three directly affiliated tertiary hospitals, eight clinical colleges and a network of teaching bases — passed into Central South University in the merger of 2000. A provincial laboratory built on this base inherits more than a century of clinical material, cohorts and research culture, which is the raw material of precision medicine.

Place among Hunan's four pillar laboratories

Hunan organised its provincial innovation system around four pillar laboratories. The Xiangjiang Laboratory, unveiled on 10 July 2022 as the first provincial laboratory inaugurated in Hunan, covers advanced computing and artificial intelligence. The Yuelushan Industrial Innovation Center and the Yuelu Mountain Laboratory address industrial innovation and the seed industry. Furong Laboratory is the medical member of the set: the pillar through which Hunan organises its clinical and life-science strength, centred on Central South University, for the precision-medicine era. Hunan University's account of the December 2022 unveiling of the Yuelushan centre's laboratories names the four together — the Yuelushan Industrial Innovation Center, Yuelushan Laboratory, Xiangjiang Laboratory and Furong Laboratory — as the four pillar laboratories of Hunan Province, and Furong's position in that list defines its rank: it is to Hunan medicine what Xiangjiang is to Hunan computing.

Leadership and organisation

The laboratory's director is Chen Xiang, who serves simultaneously as executive vice president of Central South University and dean of the Xiangya School of Medicine — an arrangement that binds the laboratory directly to the university's medical leadership. Xiang Bo serves as executive deputy director, representing the laboratory at its public and academic events. The laboratory's organisation follows the Xiangya structure: its affiliations in the literature appear both directly, as Furong Laboratory of Central South University in Changsha, and through Xiangya units such as the Center for Medical Genetics in the university's School of Life Sciences, where Furong Laboratory affiliation is carried by genetics researchers. In December, the laboratory jointly organised with the Xiangya School of Medicine an International Young Scholars Forum at the school's Fuqing Building, attended by more than 100 people, at which young scholars toured the laboratory and held talent discussions with its leadership — the recruitment face of a laboratory building a precision-medicine team with, in the school's words, a sense of mission and international vision.

The precision medicine mission

Precision medicine — tailoring prevention, diagnosis and treatment to the measured biology of individual patients — requires exactly the assets Xiangya holds: very large patient volumes, deep clinical records, biobanking and genetics capacity, and schools spanning medicine, life sciences, pharmacy and public health. Central South University's framing of the laboratory's task is explicit about the scale of ambition: to carry out organised, academically leading scientific research, explore precision medicine in China, and build a strategic scientific and technological force reflecting the national will. In practice, the laboratory's funded project titles show the mission being executed clinically — its science and technology projects include a named programme in gynaecological disease and reproductive health and projects supporting prognostic research in paediatric and bone oncology — while its affiliated publications range from single-cell computation to psychiatric genomics, the data-heavy disciplines on which precision medicine depends.

Research visible in the literature

Two affiliated papers illustrate the laboratory's scientific range. In Nature Communications, the CAPTAIN study presented a multimodal foundation model pretrained on co-assayed single-cell RNA and protein data, substantially expanding the proteomic feature space relative to standard CITE-seq measurement; its author affiliations include Furong Laboratory, Central South University, alongside Hunan University's computer science college and the Guangzhou National Laboratory — computational single-cell biology of exactly the kind a precision-medicine laboratory needs. In Molecular Psychiatry in 2025, a genetic analysis of psychosis biotypes from the international B-SNIP consortium carried a Furong Laboratory affiliation for Chao Chen of Central South University, whose group works between the university's medical genetics laboratories and the Second Xiangya Hospital's National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders — psychiatric genomics conducted at consortium scale. Between them, the papers show the laboratory's name attached to both the computational and the genomic ends of modern medical research.

Funding clinical research across the Xiangya system

The laboratory also functions as a funder within its system. Its Science and Technology Project grants appear in the funding statements of clinical studies from across the Xiangya hospitals: project 2023SK2109, designated for gynaecological disease and reproductive health, supported research on intrauterine adhesions, including work on reproductive outcomes after hysteroscopic surgery and on the molecular mechanisms of adhesion-associated fibrosis studied through metabolomics and proteomics; project 2023SK2111 supported a series of prognostic studies in osteosarcoma built on immune-infiltration-related gene signatures, published in Oncology Letters in 2025 by teams at the Xiangya-affiliated children's hospital. This is the characteristic activity of a Chinese provincial laboratory: provincial money, channelled through a named platform with a defined mission, underwriting organised research programmes across a university's hospital network rather than isolated investigator projects.

International engagement

The laboratory's international face is developing through the Xiangya system's partnerships. At the 2025 Hunan–Hong Kong Medical Exchange Symposium, held at Central South University on 20 September 2025 as part of the Talent Empowering Hunan programme, executive deputy director Xiang Bo represented the laboratory; the university presented its clinical service network of ten affiliated hospitals and the research capabilities of Furong Laboratory as central strengths, and during the visit the laboratory formally named Professor Jay S. Siegel, vice president of the University of Hong Kong and a recipient of the Chinese Government Friendship Award, an honorary visiting professor of Furong Laboratory. Siegel also toured the laboratory and Xiangya Hospital. Combined with the laboratory's joint organisation of the International Young Scholars Forum and its leaders' stated aim of building teams through global recruitment, the pattern is of a provincial laboratory deliberately constructing international links proportionate to its national mission.

Changsha's medical research landscape

Furong Laboratory gives Changsha an organised provincial platform in a city whose medical research is otherwise distributed among strong but separate institutions: Central South University's Xiangya system, Hunan University, the provincial hospitals and the national supercomputing centre that hosts the Yuelushan laboratories. By naming one laboratory as the province's medical pillar and placing it under the dean of its leading medical school, Hunan created a single address for precision-medicine strategy — the institution through which provincial funding, talent recruitment and international partnership in medicine are coordinated. Its relationship to the Xiangya hospitals mirrors that of its sister pillar laboratories to their host systems, adapted to a field in which the essential infrastructure is not a fabrication line or a computer but a century-old hospital network and its patients.

Assessment

Furong Laboratory is Hunan's medical pillar laboratory: a provincial platform directed from the top of Central South University's Xiangya system, charged with exploring precision medicine in China, funding organised clinical research programmes from reproductive health to oncology across the Xiangya hospitals, publishing through its researchers in fields from single-cell foundation models to psychiatric genomics, and building international links including an honorary professorship for the University of Hong Kong's vice president. Built on a medical institution founded in 1914 and a hospital founded in 1906, it represents the application of China's provincial-laboratory model to clinical medicine — and its progress is the measure of Hunan's precision-medicine ambitions.