Officially established on December 2nd, 2020, Tsinghua University Beijing Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) Interdisciplinary Research Institute, also known as Tsinghua University Beijing Institute of TCM-X is Tsinghua University's first TCM research institute and the world's first TCM research institute based in a comprehensive university.
The establishment of the institute was an important milestone in Prof. Shao Li's life-long mission to unravel the mystery of TCM. Prof. Shao Li, currently a tenured professor at the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, and the acting director of the Institute of TCM-X, viewed TCM as a complex system of biomolecular networks and has dedicated more than two decades of efforts to explore molecular mechanism of TCM.
In 1999, while studying PhD at Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, he proposed a hypothesis regarding the relationship between TCM and molecular network. In 2001, under the supervision of Prof. Yanda Li of the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, currently academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the honorary director of the institute of TCM-X, he began his postdoctoral research in a novel interdisciplinary field of TCM-oriented bioinformatics, which laid the foundation of the institute's research today.
The Institute of TCM-X is committed to apply modern technology (X) in the research of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), breaking the barriers between TCM and modern science, unraveling the complex system of TCM, promoting both the development of TCM and modern medicine. It takes advantage of Tsinghua University's resources in a diversity of disciplines and the strong support of several major national scientific research platforms, including Beijing National Research Center for Information, as well as various Ministry of Education, and State key laboratories. Our research integrates TCM, information science, and life sciences, aiming to establish the "Tsinghua model" of scientific research of TCM, which features the combination of medicine and engineering, modern and traditional, Chinese and Western, as well as inheritance and innovation.
To date, novel research fields emerging from TCM-oriented bioinformatics such as network pharmacology and artificial intelligence in TCM have been established, new theories regarding TCM have been proposed, and most importantly, several breakthroughs have been made in prevention and control of major diseases based on the modern use of TCM.
