Tumor Ecosystem (PDF)

Erwei Song is Professor of Breast Surgery at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU), Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences, "Cheung Kong Scholar" Chair Professor, CMB (China Medical Board) Distinguished Professor and Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (UK). Currently, he serves as President of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, SYSU. Erwei obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. at Zhongshan Medical School, and was trained as a surgeon at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, SYSU. He received postdoc training at Harvard Medical School in 2002 and became an instructor at the CBR Institute of Biomedical Research at Harvard in 2004. His early publication "RNA interference targeting Fas protects mice from fulminant hepatitis" in Nature Medicine was the first to report that siRNA could be used therapeutically in whole animal disease model. This finding was selected as one of the "Top Ten breakthroughs of the year 2003" by Science. In 2005, he returned to China and set up his own lab at Sun Yat-sen University.



As a clinician scientist, he is keen to address scientific questions derived from clinical practice. He is among the first doctors in China to perform breast-conserving surgery for breast cancer patients, which preserves the microenvironment tissues for activation of anti-tumor immunity. His study has proposed and solidified "the Theory of Tumor Ecosystem", which sheds new lights on immunotherapy. He has identified various new subtypes of cancer-associated immune cells and mesenchymal cells, new receptors of various crucial cytokines, and a new archetype of long non-coding RNAs that function as signaling molecules to regulate intracellular or intercellular signal transduction. These findings provide new therapeutic strategies for targeting tumor microenvironment as well as immunotherapies for solid tumors. By comparing patient samples before and after treatments, he has also demonstrated the critical role of miRNAs in regulating the biology of cancer stem cells