Recently, as the first author, Dr. Quan Li, a young HYIT teacher from the Provincial Engineering Research Center for Medical Materials and High-end Medical Devices, the Faculty of Mechanical and Material Engineering, and her collaborators from University of Houston, Texas Medical Center (TMC), University of Texas (UT Health SBMI), Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have published a paper entitled “A Near-infrared Probe for Detecting and Interposing β -amyloid Oligomerization in Early Alzheimer’s Disease” in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, a first-quartile top international academic journal in the field of Alzheimer’s disease, which specializes in publishing high-level research results in the field of Alzheimer’s disease, with the latest impact factor of 21.56.

Dr. Quan Li graduated from Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, CAS, with a doctoral degree of Science. She is an Excellent Young Backbone Teacher of “Qinglan Project (a project cultivating young scholars)” in Jiangsu, “Deputy General Manager of Science and Technology” of Jiangsu, reviewer of RSC/CAS Journals, and evaluation expert of Jiangsu High-tech Enterprises. Currently, she is committed to the early AD research work, and has hosted two NSFC projects (first-class postdoctoral funding, youth fund), one project of Jiangsu Education Department, one project of Studying Abroad with Provincial Public Fund Support in Jiangsu, one project of Technology Development of Tsinghua University, one project of Beijing Great Future Technology Co., LTD.; participated four National Natural Science Fund projects; published more
than 40 scientific papers including more than 30 SCI ones and applied for more than 10 patents of which 6 have been authorized invention patents.

This paper centers on early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, a chronic neurodegenerative disease with high incidence, which brings a heavy burden to the families of patients and society, posing a huge challenge to the construction of a healthy China with no specific medicine so far. Over the past 20 years, some of the world’s leading drug companies, including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Roche, have failed in clinical trials to develop treatments for AD. China is becoming an aging society, with about 10 million patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, which is expected to reach 30 million in 2030. The prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease is a worldwide problem in research frontier, as well as an urgent need to implement the national guidelines and policies for the prevention and treatment of the disease. In response to the great challenge of Alzheimer’s disease to the construction of a healthy China, our country has formulated strategies and plans for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, and put forward measures such as “early examination, early diagnosis and early intervention” and “the development of new drugs”. Phenylalanine dipeptide, an amino acid fragment of β-amyloid protein, plays a key role in the early course of Alzheimer’s disease. It has been a long-cherished dream to develop fluorescent molecular probes with high affinity, high quantum yield, good photostability and high sensitivity to β-amyloid protein, and to realize the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease by using molecular imaging technology. Aiming at solving the above scientific problems, the authors of this paper designed and developed a near-infrared fluorescent probe with specific fluorescence recognition reaction for β-amyloid oligomer, an early biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease by targeting phenylalanine dipeptide and starting from the molecular structure. The probe not only detects β-amyloid oligomers, but also inhibits β-amyloid self-assembly through π-π interaction with phenylalanine dipeptide. This mechanism proves to be promising in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and may provide a new therapeutic strategy to combat the disease and other amyloidosis.

The paper link: https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz.12673