Pharmaceutical education at WHU traces back nearly 70 years to the establishment of the medical department in the early 1900s. The University established the Pharmacy discipline in 1994, and in the same year students were admitted to the Bachelor’s degree program. The School of Pharmaceutical Sciences became an independent college in 2001 by integrating several divisions of the University’s medical and pharmaceutical branches. Since then, the discipline has expanded rapidly. Currently, the discipline offers two undergraduate programs and one graduate program, which cover all of the sub-disciplines of pharmacy: Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Analysis and Screening, Biopharmaceutical Sciences, Traditional Chinese and Natural Products Medicine, and Clinical Pharmacy. In addition, the school has the fully equipped experimental center for Pharmaceutical Sciences as well as national and provincial research laboratories. The school is emerging as a world-class research institution and one of the country’s top-tier pharmacy schools.
The school’s faculty has continued to grow since its establishment in 2001. As of 2020, the school has 76 faculty members who make groundbreaking discoveries and lead the way in the pharmaceutical sciences. Among its well-qualified academic staff are 37 professors and 31 associate professors, including 1 academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 3 members of the Recruitment Program of Global Experts, 3 members of the Outstanding Young Scholars of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), 2 members of the National Youth Talent Support Program, 6 members of the Education Ministry's New Century Excellent Talents Supporting Plan, 4 Luojia Chair Professors and 6 Chutian Chair Professors. Our faculty serves the national interests by educating students and making innovative discoveries with their expertise in the pharmaceutical field.
For over a decade, the school has been embracing challenges and making groundbreaking discoveries in the pharmaceutical sciences. In the last few years, the school has been actively involved in the establishment of the State Key Laboratory of Virology and Wuhan Institute of Biotechnology. Between 2016-2020, the school received 250 million research funds from national agencies and private companies. 224 research projects have been granted by national funding agencies and programs, including the National Natural Science Foundation, the National Basic Research Program (“973 Program”), the National High-Tech R&D Program (“863 Program”), and the National Key Technology R & D Program. Remarkably, three projects have been funded by the Special Project on High-Performance Computing under the National Key R&D. The school has made breakthrough discoveries in nanotechnology, self-driving drug delivery, Cryo-EM, epigenetics, natural product discovery, antibiotic synthesis, biomedical imaging and other related areas. More than 450 scientific papers have been published in reputable journals including Nature Microbiology, Nature Communications, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, and more.
A new vitamin E synthesis platform accountable for 1/4 of the global market share. Professor Liu Tiangang developed a new method for the economical and large-scale synthesis of vitamin E by bacterial fermentation. This new route is green and cost-effective, and represents a revolutionary advancement from the previous organic synthesis method. It was selected as one of the Hubei “Big 10” hi-tech events in 2018. Nenter & Co., Inc., the recipient of the technique transfer, achieved a sales milestone of 2.12 billion Yuan in 3 years. Responsibility and duty during the 2020 Covid-19 crisis. During the pandemic outbreak in Jan. 2020, hospitals struggled to diagnose positive patients among the mass population. Professor Liu Tiangang developed a quick and efficient diagnostic method by using a nanopore sequencing method. The new method can not only identify the coronavirus, but also distinguish between the other 40 common respiratory viruses.
With a decade-long effort, our discipline has built a good reputation in the country and abroad. In the first national discipline evaluation (2016), our pharmacy discipline was rated B+, higher than 85% of pharmacy schools in China. The WHU Pharmacy discipline has consecutively held ranks between 160-300 in several of the most reputable discipline rankings including US News, ARWU World University Rankings, and QS World University Rankings. Pharmacology and Toxicology, the core sub-discipline of pharmacy, ranked in the ESI global top 0.5% (5 out of 1000), being one of the top 300 in the world. In 2019, the Shanghai Ranking placed the WHU pharmacy discipline at 13th, an exciting progression since being ranked 23rd in 2018.
