About Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences

The Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health (SINH) is a research institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai and a national institution of basic and applied research focusing on healthy ageing, major chronic diseases, nutrition and food safety, with emphasis on application and biotechnology development. Its director's message — signed by Li Lin as scientific director — sets out a triple identity: as a research organisation it carries out academic activities, as a think tank it advises on national health-related policies, and as an educational institution it develops the next generation of researchers. It is distinct from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, the former grouping from which it was formed and which is profiled separately, and from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, a separate CAS drug-discovery institute in the same city.

Founded in 2016 from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences

SINH was founded in 2016 by merging four institutes and two centres of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), CAS. The traces of that merger are visible in the institute's own structure. Its Institutional Center for Shared Technologies and Facilities was established at the end of 2016 by merging the public technology service centres of INS, IHS and PICB — the Institute for Nutritional Sciences, the health sciences institute and the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology — which had been research institutes affiliated to the former SIBS. Individual biographies tell the same story of continuity: Professor Lin Xu, for example, became a professor and principal investigator at the Institute for Nutritional Sciences in SIBS in 2003 and directed the CAS Key Laboratory of Nutrition and Metabolism from 2008 to 2016, and records that since 2017 the institution where she works has been reformed and renamed as SINH. The new institute thus inherited established nutrition, health-science and computational-biology communities in Shanghai and re-pointed them at a single theme: human nutrition and health.

Healthy China 2030 and the case for a nutrition and health institute

The timing was deliberate. The director's message explains that China is facing new challenges posed by industrialisation, urbanisation, environmental and lifestyle changes and an increasingly ageing population, and that to address them the Chinese government released its "Healthy China 2030" blueprint in 2016, aiming to satisfy citizens' increased health expectations and build a healthy China over the following 15 years — the same year SINH was founded. Aligning scientific discovery and technological innovation with those national priorities, the institute's scientists work with the goal of promoting health management services, the development of health care and the bio-industry, striving to make important discoveries and develop new products and technologies to improve nutrition and health. SINH's founding can therefore be read as CAS's institutional answer to a shift in China's disease burden, from infectious disease toward the chronic, metabolic and age-related conditions that diet, environment and longevity produce.

Four research areas

SINH organises its science into four major areas, as set out in its director's message: prevention and control of chronic diseases, and healthy ageing; nutrition and food safety; biomedical big data and health management; and information analysis in life sciences. Its recruitment and principal-investigator pages express the same programme in more granular form. The institute's stated research areas for its groups include metabolic homeostasis and intervention of chronic diseases, immune dysfunction in chronic diseases, and the interplay between chronic diseases and ageing; its recruitment areas run from human nutrition, metabolism and epidemiology through to bioinformatics and medical informatics and computational biology. Around 60 research groups, led by principal investigators recruited from around the world, carry this programme; the faculty includes academicians of CAS and of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and holders of National Excellent Young Scholars honours. The CAS Shanghai Branch's account puts the whole institute — faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students — at around 1,000 people.

Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor

The first of SINH's three CAS key laboratories is the Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, directed, in the institute's research-divisions listing, by Kong Xiangyin, with Qian Youcun and Qin Jun as deputy directors and 19 principal investigators. Its research focuses are tumour genetic and epigenetic regulation and intervention; immune regulation and tumour intervention; and stem cell research and tumour therapy. Work from this laboratory's community illustrates the approach: researchers in Professor Sun Yu's group at SINH found that amphiregulin (AREG), a soluble factor produced by the treatment-damaged tumour microenvironment, confers resistance on surviving cancer cells and simultaneously creates an immunosuppressive niche by engaging PD-L1, and that once AREG is released from senescent stromal cells into the blood of post-treatment cancer patients it can be exploited as a non-invasive biomarker for evaluating therapeutic effects and prognosis — research published in Aging Cell in September 2019, supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and CAS. It is a characteristic SINH result, connecting the ageing biology of senescent cells to cancer treatment resistance.

Key Laboratory of Nutrition, Metabolism and Food Safety

The second key laboratory, the Key Laboratory of Nutrition, Metabolism and Food Safety, is directed by Ying Hao, with Zhai Qiwei and Wu Aibo as deputy directors and 18 principal investigators. Its listed research focuses are nutrient sensing signalling; metabolic regulation networks; nutritional intervention and metabolic diseases; toxic mechanisms and metabolic pathways of food-borne hazards; and food safety risk assessment and pollution control. This is the laboratory that carries the "nutrition" in the institute's name into both directions at once: how nutrients and metabolic signals drive obesity, diabetes and related disorders, and how hazards in food do harm. Professor Lin Xu's programme, described above, sits in this tradition: her team studies the effects of genetic and environmental factors — diet and lifestyle — and their interactions on obesity, metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes in Chinese populations, the predictive role of omics-based biomarkers, dietary intervention for people at high metabolic risk, and individual nutritional needs. As principal investigator of the national genome-wide association study for type 2 diabetes supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, her team established the first GWAS database for type 2 diabetes in China, with 20,000 subjects, discovered or confirmed about 300 genetic variants associated with obesity, type 2 diabetes and other metabolic abnormalities and with fatty acid, vitamin D and iron status, and built a multi-omics prospective Chinese cohort identifying over 100 omics-based biomarkers related to diet, nutrients or environmental exposure.

Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, the Bio-Med Big Data Center and the genomics data partnership

The third key laboratory, the Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, is directed by Wang Sijia, with Shao Zhen, Zhang Guoqing and Li Haipeng as deputy directors and 12 principal investigators. Its focuses are big data analysis of complex gene expression regulation; system modelling and simulation for complex traits; population genetic models and evolutionary analysis; and biomedical big data. Attached to this community is SINH's Bio-Med Big Data Center, which is committed to providing full-cycle big data services — data collection and sharing, data management and analysis — to biomedical research in CAS, in Shanghai and across the nation; to building the technical framework for data security, integration, sharing and mining and a collaborative network for biomedical data resources; and to bolstering the national biomedical big data system and accelerating interdisciplinary fusion between biology, medicine, mathematics and information technology.

That data role is national as well as local. The National Genomics Data Center (NGDC), officially approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance in June 2019 and part of the China National Center for Bioinformation, was established on the basis of the BIG Data Center at the Beijing Institute of Genomics, jointly in close collaboration with two CAS institutions: the Institute of Biophysics and SINH. The NGDC's annual database-resources papers in Nucleic Acids Research list SINH's contribution by affiliation as the National Genomics Data Center and Bio-Med Big Data Center at SINH's CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, at 320 Yueyang Road in Shanghai. The centre's mission — archiving, managing and processing genomics data and providing open access to database resources for researchers in academia and industry worldwide — is thus one to which SINH is a founding partner, not merely a user.

Think tank, information centre and engineering laboratory

SINH's non-laboratory units carry its public missions. The Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences serves as a life science think tank providing support to national and local governments and to academic and industrial communities, and promoting public understanding of science in life sciences, biotechnology and the health industry; its services include strategic decision support, frontier tracking, technology foresight, technology research, development and transfer, and scientific evaluation, and it promotes open cooperation with other high-level research and development think tanks. The director's message makes the same point from the top: through its information centre the institute offers quality information services on life sciences and interdisciplinary fields to government and society and promotes public understanding of science related to health and nutrition. The Engineering Laboratory, meanwhile, is the institute's platform for applied basic research, aiming to promote interaction between basic and applied research along industry tracks such as functional foods, food safety, skin health, and artificial intelligence and digital health, providing scientific and technological support for the nutrition and health industry; it has established long-term strategic cooperation with leading enterprises.

Core facilities

The shared facilities inherited and merged in 2016 support all of this work. The Institutional Center for Shared Technologies and Facilities, formed at the end of 2016 from the service centres of the predecessor institutes, comprises several platforms. The Public Testing Technical Core Facility is equipped with flow cytometers, mass spectrometers, microscopic imaging systems, automated workstations, ultra-high-speed centrifuges, quantitative fluorescence PCR systems and single-cell sequencers, providing end-to-end support spanning immunophenotyping, spatial imaging, proteomics, metabolomics and molecular biology. The Laboratory Animal Technical Platform provides feeding management, technical training and instrument operation guidance, operated by a team of 18 certified technicians and maintaining four sub-facilities for specific-pathogen-free mice and rats, including 13,000 mouse cages and 100 rat cages. The Morphology and Spatial Multi-Omics Platform was established in July 2022, evolving from the Quantitative Biology Quality Control Platform, and focuses on chronic diseases, immunity, ageing and population cohorts with big data. The High-resolution Mass Spectrometry Cofacility runs a Thermo Scientific Q Exactive Plus Orbitrap instrument with a Vanquish liquid chromatography system, with pipelines for targeted and untargeted metabolomics and isotope tracing to investigate metabolic reprogramming during disease progression.

Education and collaboration

As an educational institution, SINH runs graduate and postdoctoral programmes; around 500 students are currently enrolled in its graduate programmes, in the director's message's figure, taught within its roughly 60 research groups. The institute states that it attaches great importance to cooperation as a key to progress, and has established extensive and diversified forms of collaboration with universities, research institutes, hospitals and industry in China and abroad. Its Nature Index profile records a research output concentrated in biological sciences and health sciences, consistent with its declared programme. Collaboration is also built into its genetics work, where Chinese population cohorts, hospital partners and the national genomics data infrastructure meet.

Place in China's health research system

SINH's distinctiveness is the joining of subjects that are usually separated. Nutrition and food safety, tumour microenvironment biology, metabolic and immune mechanisms of chronic disease and ageing, computational biology and national-scale biomedical data are housed in one institute, under three key laboratories, precisely because the questions of healthy ageing and chronic disease prevention run across all of them. Founded in 2016 — the year of Healthy China 2030 — from four SIBS institutes and two centres, advising government as a think tank while training some 500 graduate students and partnering in the National Genomics Data Center, the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health is CAS's dedicated national institution for the science of nutrition and health.