About Lingang Laboratory

Lingang Laboratory

Lingang Laboratory is a national laboratory in Shanghai, China, classified in the Nature Index as a government-sector research institution. It takes its name from Lingang — also written Lin-gang — the special area on Shanghai's southern coast, in Pudong, that the city has developed around the Lingang Center, the permanent venue of the World Laureates Forum. The laboratory's researchers, however, publish with a Shanghai address in the postcode district 200031, and papers giving a full address place it at No. 319 Yueyang Road, in Xuhui District; its e-mail domain, used by its researchers in published correspondence, is lglab.ac.cn. What can be said with confidence about the laboratory comes principally from its published research record, which is substantial and rapidly growing, from the named programmes its scientists lead, and from its public role in Shanghai's scientific life. That record shows a young laboratory concentrated in the life and health sciences: brain technology and brain-computer interfaces, computational and systems biology, oncology and pharmacology, with additional output in chemistry and the applied sciences. Its leading collaborators, by co-authored output in the Nature Index, are the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Name, Place and Published Address

The laboratory's English name is Lingang Laboratory, and its Chinese name is given in the Nature Index as Shanghai Lingang Laboratory. The name ties it to the Lingang Special Area, the section of the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone on the city's southern coast that has been built up as a new innovation district: the Lingang Center there hosts the World Laureates Forum, and a development plan unveiled in January 2026 set out the aim of transforming Lin-gang into a world-class sci-tech innovation hub through 2035, in differentiated development alongside Zhangjiang Science City, jointly supporting Shanghai's ambition to become a global science and technology innovation centre. Against that naming, the laboratory's publication addresses tell a more specific story. Journal articles by its researchers consistently give the affiliation as Lingang Laboratory, Shanghai 200031, China. A 2024 paper in Briefings in Bioinformatics on a neural-network method for predicting acid dissociation constants gives the full form: Lingang Laboratory, No. 319 Yueyang Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai, 200031, China. Yueyang Road is in central Shanghai, in the district long associated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai institutes, and other Lingang researchers hold joint affiliations in the same neighbourhood, including with the CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health. Correspondence addresses published for its researchers use the domain lglab.ac.cn. A directory entry should therefore record both facts exactly as they are attested: a national laboratory named for Shanghai's Lingang Special Area, whose researchers publish from the Yueyang Road address in Xuhui.

A Young Laboratory in the Publication Record

The clearest evidence of the laboratory's age and growth is its Nature Index record. The Nature Index tracks primary research articles in a selected set of applied, health, natural and social science journals and reports both a Count of articles and a fractional Share of author contribution. In the Index's five-year Share table for Lingang Laboratory, overall Share is recorded as 0.00 in 2021, rising to 0.31 in 2022, 2.53 in 2023, 4.46 in 2024 and 9.44 in 2025. A research institution does not produce a record of that shape by accident: it is the signature of a laboratory that began publishing under its own name in about 2022 and then expanded its output rapidly year by year. Individual papers support the same dating. A researcher in genetics and ophthalmology who moved from Harvard Medical School acknowledged a Lingang Laboratory startup fund received after 20 July 2022, and a 2023 paper in Nucleic Acids Research on long-read RNA sequencing was already published from the laboratory. No founding ceremony or establishment date for the laboratory is documented in the English-language sources consulted for this profile, and none is asserted here; the verified record is a publication presence that starts in 2022 and grows steeply thereafter.

Research Output by Subject

In the Nature Index window from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026, Lingang Laboratory recorded an overall Count of 55 articles with a Share of 8.61. The balance of that output defines the laboratory's character. Health sciences was its largest subject area, with a Count of 25 and a Share of 4.27, followed by biological sciences with a Count of 18, chemistry with a Count of 6, applied sciences with a Count of 5 and physical sciences with a Count of 1. By position, the laboratory ranked 1,492nd globally and 448th in China overall by Share in that window, and 159th globally and 41st in China within the government sector. Its leading research topics in the same window were biochemistry and cell biology, with a Count of 8, oncology and carcinogenesis, with a Count of 7 and the largest topic Share at 2.29, zoology, with a Count of 7, pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences, organic chemistry, genetics, biomedical engineering and medicinal and biomolecular chemistry. The journals in which its authors published in an earlier Index window tell the same story in another form: 16 articles in Nature Communications, four in Neuron, three each in Cell and Science Advances, two each in Nature and Nature Biotechnology, and single articles in journals including Molecular Cell, Nature Methods, Nature Neuroscience and ACS Nano. That is the publication profile of a laboratory working principally on cells, brains, cancer and medicines, publishing in the leading general and specialist journals of the life sciences.

Brain Technology and Brain-Computer Interfaces

The laboratory's most clearly documented named programme is in brain technology. Dr Chengyu Li is identified in conference reporting as a senior researcher at Lingang Laboratory, its Chief Scientist for brain-computer interfaces, and Director of its Department of Brain Technology and Engineering. Presenting at the 21st Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Genomics, held in Shenzhen in September 2026 under the theme Bio-Generative Intelligence for Health, Dr Li described the application directions of brain-computer interface technology and the work of his team to explore the composition and functional mechanisms of the brain. According to that report, the team has applied multi-omics technologies to analyse brain cells in model animals such as macaques and marmosets, and has produced what is described as the world's first single-cell spatial distribution atlas of the primate cerebral cortex. The same team has independently developed a range of tools for its purpose, including invasive brain-computer interface chips, electrodes, algorithms, packaging technologies and integrated systems. Shanghai's wider brain-computer interface programme provides the context in which that work sits: a Shanghai science report describing the city's brain-intelligence hub and its January 2025 action plan for the brain-computer interface future industry described Lingang Laboratory as a leading hub for brain-computer interface research in China and as spearheading a national innovation consortium in the field. The laboratory's journal record is consistent with a serious neuroscience commitment, with multiple articles in Neuron and Nature Neuroscience among its Index outputs.

Computational Biology and Systems Approaches

A second documented strand of the laboratory's work is computational. Published correspondence for Lingang Laboratory researchers includes Wu Wei, whose e-mail address at the laboratory accompanies work done with the CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The 2023 Nucleic Acids Research paper from the laboratory, on the identification and quantification of small exon-containing isoforms in long-read RNA sequencing data, is a methods contribution to the analysis of transcriptomes, the kind of computational tool on which genomics depends. Later work with Lingang affiliation includes a study unravelling tumour invasion through integrated multimodal spatial transcriptomics, published with collaborators at the University of Tokyo and at Academy institutes in Shanghai and Hangzhou, and a paper on a solvable neural circuit model revealing the dynamical principle of non-optimal temporal weighting in perceptual decision making, co-authored from the laboratory with Peking University. Taken together, these papers show a laboratory in which computation is not a service function but a research direction in its own right, applied to RNA, to tumours and to the brain, and carried on in joint appointments with Academy computational biology groups.

Oncology, Pharmacology and Drug Discovery

Cancer and medicines form the third strand, and in the Nature Index topic table they are the laboratory's strongest themes after cell biology: oncology and carcinogenesis carried its largest topic Share, and pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences and medicinal and biomolecular chemistry both appear among its leading topics. Its health sciences output, a Count of 25 articles in the July 2025 to June 2026 window, was larger than any other subject area. Affiliation-level evidence points the same way. A 2026 iScience paper presenting a scalable, high-throughput glue perturbation screening platform for molecular glue discovery — a current approach to drug discovery based on small molecules that bring proteins together — lists Lingang Laboratory, Shanghai, among its author affiliations, alongside the State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China. A syndicated report on artificial intelligence in drug discovery described a virtual system named OriGene, unveiled by Shanghai's Lingang Laboratory and designed to tackle the hardest step in drug discovery, picking the right target, mimicking how scientists think by sifting through data and literature, with early tests suggesting it could spot promising cancer targets more reliably than existing artificial intelligence models. That report is noted here as a report, not as a laboratory publication; but it accords with the laboratory's verified pattern of combining computational methods with cancer and pharmacology research, the combination its Index topics describe.

Cell Biology and Laboratory Science

Underpinning those themes, the laboratory's largest single topic by article Count in the July 2025 to June 2026 Index window was biochemistry and cell biology, with eight articles. Work published under its affiliation includes a 2025 Nature Communications study engineering bi-directional chemically modulated synthetic condensates for cellular control, carried out with the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Shanghai Children's Medical Center of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, among other partners. Genetics appears among its leading topics, and its researchers include scientists recruited from overseas laboratories: the genetics and ophthalmology researcher whose acknowledgements record a Lingang startup fund from July 2022 published, with Harvard Medical School collaborators, on retinal cell biology in eLife, with optical imaging support acknowledged from Lingang Laboratory staff and from the Shanghai Research Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence. Zoology, with seven articles in the Index window, reflects the animal work — including the macaque and marmoset studies of the brain programme — on which parts of the laboratory's biology rest. The picture is of a wet-laboratory life science institution as well as a computational one, working at cell and organism level.

Collaboration Network

The Nature Index collaboration record shows a laboratory deeply embedded in Shanghai and Academy science, and only lightly connected abroad in the windows reported. In the March 2025 to February 2026 window, 95.6 per cent of its collaboration by Share was domestic, across 107 institutions, and 4.4 per cent international, across 40 institutions; in the later July 2025 to June 2026 window the domestic share was higher still. Its top domestic collaborators by collaboration score in the earlier window were the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ShanghaiTech University, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai Jiao Tong University; in the later window East China Normal University joined that leading group. Those partners are also visible in its papers' bylines: joint affiliations with ShanghaiTech University's School of Life Science and Technology, with Academy institutes in Shanghai, and with Shanghai Jiao Tong University's medical school recur in its publications. International collaborators named in its papers and Index tables include Harvard Medical School, Stanford University, the University of Tokyo and, in the Index collaboration table, institutions in Hungary, the United Kingdom and Denmark. For a young laboratory, the pattern is notable: its standing rests on dense co-authorship with the strongest research institutions in its own city and academy system.

Public Role: The World Laureates Forum

The laboratory's clearest public role is in the World Laureates Forum, the gathering of Nobel laureates and other prize-winning scientists held at its permanent venue, the Lingang Center in Shanghai. For the 2026 forum, held from 30 October to 1 November under the theme New Science Paradigm: Break Through for the Next Decade, six parallel forums were organised on future semiconductors, biomedicine, aerospace information, artificial intelligence, future energy and quantum science. The biomedicine parallel forum was organised by Lingang Laboratory, in a list that placed it alongside Shanghai University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China Normal University, Fudan University and Tongji University as the organising institutions, each working with national academic societies and leading companies. At the forum's press conference, held in Lingang on 22 October 2026, the laboratory was represented by Xu Xu, identified as Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee of Lingang Laboratory, speaking alongside senior representatives of those universities and of the Lingang Special Area Administrative Committee. Organising the biomedicine forum of the World Laureates Forum is a fitting public expression of the laboratory's verified profile: a life and health sciences institution, based in the forum's home district, acting as a convener of its field as well as a producer of research.

Significance and the Limits of the Public Record

Lingang Laboratory matters in a directory of China's research institutions because of what its brief, verifiable record already shows. Within about four years of its first publications under its own name, it had built a Nature Index Share larger than many long-established institutes, concentrated in health and biological sciences; it hosts a named department of brain technology and engineering whose chief scientist leads work on primate brain atlases and invasive brain-computer interface systems, in a city that treats brain-computer interfaces as a future industry and describes the laboratory as a leading hub for that research in China; it works computationally on RNA, tumours and neural circuits; and it is trusted by its city to organise the biomedicine forum of the World Laureates Forum. Equally, an honest profile must state what the public English-language record consulted here does not show. No verified founding date, founding sponsors, staff total or director's name for the laboratory was found in those sources, and this profile asserts none of them. Where later official or primary sources publish that information, the record can be completed. What stands without it is still a coherent institution: a Shanghai national laboratory, publishing from Yueyang Road under the domain lglab.ac.cn, whose output in oncology, pharmacology, cell biology and brain science has grown from nothing in 2021 to a Share of 9.44 in 2025, and whose name — Lingang — links it to the new science district on Shanghai's southern coast that Shanghai intends, by 2035, to make a world-class innovation hub.