About State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology

State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology

The State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology, at Fudan University in Shanghai, was China's first national key laboratory in neuroscience. Established in 1992 — some of the institute's own later materials date its formal establishment to 1994 — it is based at the Institutes of Brain Science (IOBS) of Fudan University, with which it merged in 2015 to form a combined IOBS/SKLab entity. It works on brain function and brain disorders: the basic principles of sensory neurobiology, the mechanisms of higher cognitive functions, and the development of next-generation treatments for major brain disorders. Following restructuring in 2023, it has also been presented under the name State Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disorders. This profile uses its long-attested classic name.

Origins in Acupuncture and Neurobiology Research

The laboratory's roots lie in an unusual place: the scientific study of acupuncture. At Shanghai First Medical College, research on the principles of acupuncture began in 1958 under physiologist F. Y. Xu. In 1975 Professor X. D. Cao, J. S. Cheng and colleagues established a Laboratory of Acupuncture Research, which in 1985 was formally named the Institute of Acupuncture Research, encompassing neurophysiological, neuropharmacological, neuromorphological, neurobiochemical, clinical physiological, neuroimmunological and molecular biological laboratories. Integrative medicine and neurobiology became a master's and doctoral degree station in 1981 and a national key discipline in 1989.

On that foundation, the former Shanghai Medical University united its neurobiological researchers and established the State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology, with acupuncture research remaining one of its contributing fields. The acupuncture institute strengthened the laboratory, and the laboratory in turn supported acupuncture research — an arrangement Fudan's own history describes as developing neuroscience research the Chinese way. When Fudan University and Shanghai Medical University merged in 2000, the field continued within Shanghai Medical College, and the Department of Integrative Medicine and Neurobiology was established in March 2002, with the discipline again selected as a national key discipline in 2002 and 2007. The department remains a principal investigator unit of the laboratory.

Establishment and the Institutes of Brain Science

The Institutes of Brain Science at Fudan University was established in 2006 with support from the Ministry of Education's 985 Program. Its founding director was Professor Xiong-Li Yang, a prominent neuroscientist and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences known for work on retinal and sensory neurobiology. In 2015 the State Key Laboratory and IOBS were merged, with a strengthened distinctive role in advancing interdisciplinary research and bench-to-bedside translation. The current director of the combined entity is Professor Lan Ma, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences whose research addresses the mechanisms of drug addiction.

In 2018 IOBS/SKLab was selected for the Ministry of Education's Frontiers Science Center for Brain Science programme, becoming the core of a brain science research and education cluster at Fudan known as the Frontiers Science Center for Brain Science. The centre, the institutes and the laboratory operate as an integrated whole on Fudan's medical campus in Shanghai.

People: Investigators and Leadership

The combined IOBS/SKLab currently has 44 full-time principal investigators, including three academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to the institutes' own introduction. Earlier feature reporting described a larger community of talented investigators — around 69 principal investigators at the time of that account — and recorded that its investigators had published more than a thousand research papers and reviews in internationally recognised journals, and enrolled more than 500 graduate and doctoral students, between 2005 and 2019. The two figures reflect different dates and counting bases — full-time laboratory investigators versus the wider institutes community — but agree on the scale: this is one of China's largest university neuroscience communities.

Xiong-Li Yang's founding leadership gave the institutes their sensory neurobiology strength and their academic committee chairmanship in later years. Lan Ma, who joined in 2012 and became director of IOBS and the laboratory, works with her team on the molecular mechanisms underlying drug addiction, a long-standing puzzle in neurobiology with direct clinical stakes. Other investigators illustrate the breadth: Nashat Abumaria, at the laboratory since 2015 after doctoral training at Göttingen and postdoctoral work at the German Primate Center and Tsinghua, leads a laboratory for emotion and cognition studying neural mechanisms of aversive memories, normal memory and adaptive decision-making, and reports generating the first animal model of giving-up behaviour in response to failure in rodents. Researchers recruited from institutions such as Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory work on the differentiation of neural stem cells and related developmental questions.

Research Mission: From Sensory Principles to Brain Disorders

The institutes' stated mission is to take on cutting-edge research to reveal the basic principles of sensory neurobiology, define the mechanisms of higher cognitive functions, and develop next-generation treatments for major brain disorders. Nature's account of Shanghai brain science describes the laboratory as China's first national key laboratory in the field, notes that it led a national major project exploring the associations between brain functions and major brain diseases, and highlights its advances in the mechanisms of drug addiction and reward processing as holding valuable clinical potential.

That combination — sensory systems, cognition, addiction and disease — distinguishes the Fudan laboratory from its Shanghai sibling, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience, whose state key laboratory concentrates on basic mechanisms across all neuroscience. The Fudan laboratory's medical setting, within a medical college and alongside clinical departments, orients it toward disorders: how brain circuits for reward, emotion, memory and perception are disrupted in addiction, psychiatric and neurological disease, and how those circuit mechanisms can become treatment targets.

Drug Addiction and Reward: A Signature Programme

Lan Ma's programme exemplifies the laboratory's approach. The molecular mechanisms underlying drug addiction long intrigued her, and her team at IOBS/SKLab has worked on how drugs of abuse remodel brain circuits — including studies of how morphine-related signalling acts through cytokines and neural circuits, and work involving interneurons in the prelimbic cortex, a region implicated in executive control and relapse. Such research connects molecular signalling to circuit change to behaviour, the three levels a medical neurobiology laboratory must join if its findings are to inform treatment.

Reward processing more broadly — how the brain assigns value, learns from outcomes and makes decisions — runs through several groups, linking the addiction programme to research on emotion, memory and decision-making such as Abumaria's. The clinical relevance is direct: addiction, depression and other disorders of motivation and affect are among the largest unmet needs in medicine, and mechanistic insight is the bottleneck for new therapeutics.

Facilities and Platforms

The institutes maintain state-of-the-art core facilities described in feature reporting as including in vivo and high-resolution imaging facilities, platforms for behavioural neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging for small animals, and single-cell platforms, among others. Blood–brain barrier research and neural development studies during the first year of life are among the many directions such infrastructure supports. Imaging, behaviour and single-cell analysis together allow the laboratory's groups to move from a molecule to a circuit to a behaving animal — and, through clinical collaboration, toward human studies — without leaving the institution.

Training and the Frontiers Science Center

Training is integral to the laboratory's mandate: it is described by Fudan as an important base for high-level neuroscience research and talent cultivation in China. The Frontiers Science Center for Brain Science, sponsored by the Ministry of Education from 2018, organises brain science research and education as a cluster based on IOBS/SKLab, and the combined entity runs international doctoral forums on brain science and recruits graduate students across neurobiology, pharmacology, biophysics and neurology backgrounds. The department of integrative medicine and neurobiology that co-hosts the laboratory adds its own lineage — China's first doctoral programme in its field in 1981 and a World Health Organization collaborating centre for traditional Chinese medicine from 1983 — to the training mix.

Restructuring as Brain Function and Disorders

After restructuring in 2023, the laboratory was officially renamed the State Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disorders, as Fudan's forum materials record, serving as an important base for high-level neuroscience research and talent cultivation in China. The institutes' current English introduction uses the same formulation: the State Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disorders, formerly known as the State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology, was established in 1992 and merged with IOBS in 2015. The new name states the laboratory's mature identity plainly — brain function, and what happens when it is disordered — while the institution, leadership and campus remain continuous with the classic laboratory.

Standing and Significance

The State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology holds a distinctive place in Chinese science. It grew from acupuncture-principle research begun in 1958 into China's first national key laboratory for neuroscience, merged with a purpose-built Institutes of Brain Science in 2015, and now operates as the core of a Ministry of Education Frontiers Science Center under Lan Ma's directorship, with 44 full-time principal investigators. Its signature contributions — in sensory neurobiology under its founding director Xiong-Li Yang, and in the molecular and circuit mechanisms of drug addiction and reward — connect basic circuit science to the brain disorders that medicine most needs to understand. Few laboratories anywhere can trace so direct a line from traditional medicine research to modern translational neuroscience.