z-bio 2025-11-24 3640

　　Professor Song Huan is a distinguished researcher and doctoral supervisor at the West China Institute of Biomedical Big Data at Sichuan University. He also serves as the chief scientist of "Medical Big Data" in the "Double First-Class" advanced deployment discipline of Sichuan University. Professor Song Huan's research interests include mental stress-related epidemic research, cohort database construction and management, and medical big data application and mining.

　　Recently, a series of research papers have been published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, British Journal of Anaesthesia, European Journal of Epidemiology, Molecular Psychiatry, and BMC Medicine.

　　1. Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy (IF=52.7): Revealed that GPR15 is a molecular switch that aggravates Crohn’s disease but alleviates ulcerative colitis due to smoking.

　　Thesis title: GPR15 differentially regulates the effects of cigarette smoke exposure on Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis

　　Core Highlight: Why does smoking worsen Crohn's disease (CD) but alleviate ulcerative colitis (UC)? This clinical "reverse paradox" has long lacked a molecular explanation. This study is the first to identify the G protein-coupled receptor GPR15 as the "molecular switch" that smoke differentially regulates IBD: In CD, smoking up-regulates GPR15, driving pro-inflammatory Th17 cells to home in the intestine, exacerbating inflammation; in UC, smoking down-regulates GPR15, inhibiting pathological immune cell infiltration, and alleviating inflammation. The team integrated the triple evidence of multi-national population cohorts, GPR15 knockout mice and cell adoptive transfer to confirm that GPR15 expression levels can accurately predict the benefits and harms of smoking on individual patients. More importantly, targeted antagonism of GPR15 or its ligands can "reprogram" the opposite effects of smoking on CD and UC in animal models, providing the first druggable target and biomarker for precise classification and intervention of the two types of diseases, filling the gap in the mechanism and translation of smoking's differential regulation of IBD.

　　Author information: Professor Song Huan, Professor Chen Yi, and Professor Deng Cheng are the co-corresponding authors. The Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of West China Hospital of Sichuan University, the West China Biomedical Big Data Center of West China Hospital of Sichuan University, and the Department of Experimental Medicine of West China Hospital of Sichuan University are the core completion units.

　　2. British Journal of Anaesthesia (IF=9.2): Revealed that the genetic structure of CPSP has significant surgical site heterogeneity

　　Thesis title: Genetic variants associated with chronic postsurgical pain: evidence from the China Surgery and Anaesthesia Cohort study

　　Core Highlights: Chronic postoperative pain (CPSP) is a common complication of surgery, affecting about 10%-50% of patients. Its mechanism of occurrence has not been fully elucidated, and there is a lack of effective prediction methods. Based on the Chinese Surgery and Anesthesia Cohort (CSAC), this study conducted the first large-scale genome-wide association study of CPSP to systematically screen for genetic variants associated with chronic postoperative pain. The research team included nearly 10,000 surgical patients, combined with long-term follow-up and genotyping, and found multiple susceptibility sites significantly related to the risk of CPSP, suggesting that neuroinflammation, pain signaling, and neuroplasticity-related pathways play a key role. This study provides a genetic basis for individualized risk prediction of CPSP and is expected to promote the establishment of precise prevention and control strategies for postoperative pain.

　　Author information: Professor Song Huan, Professor Li Qian, and Professor Ke Bowen are the co-corresponding authors, and the Department of Anesthesiology, West China Hospital of Sichuan University is the core completion unit.

　　3. European Journal of Epidemiology (IF=5.9): WHALE focuses on "health-disease transformation" and provides data for active medical treatment and mechanism research

　　Thesis title: Cohort profile: the West-China hospital alliance longitudinal epidemiology wellness (WHALE) study

　　Core Highlights: In China, more than 500 million people participate in health examinations every year, but the data is fragmented and the standards are inconsistent, making it difficult to support accurate public health decisions. WHALE innovatively builds a "database + cohort" dual-core model based on 1.52 million+ participants and more than 3.4 million health records. It has the advantages of long-term historical data and forward-looking follow-up. The sample is gender-balanced and has wide coverage. It integrates multi-dimensional data across the "genetics-behavior-environment" chain, and contains a large amount of repeated measurement data to capture dynamic changes in health. It relies on a robust quality control system to ensure credibility, breaks through the limitations of traditional research, and provides high-quality data support for active medical development and analysis of disease mechanisms. It has both academic value and clinical application prospects.

　　Author information: Professor Song Huan and Professor Huang Jin are the co-corresponding authors, and the Health Management Center of West China Hospital of Sichuan University and the West China Biomedical Big Data Center of West China Hospital of Sichuan University are the core completion units.

　　4. Molecular Psychiatry (IF=9.6): Construct a three-dimensional disease network model to provide a roadmap for comorbid disease early warning and intervention

　　Thesis title: Disease clusters and their genetic determinants following a diagnosis of depression: analyzes based on a novel three-dimensional disease network approach

　　Core Highlights: Depression is not only an independent mental disorder, but also the "initiator" of multiple physical diseases. However, its subsequent comorbidity patterns and genetic mechanisms have long lacked systematic characterization. This study proposes a new three-dimensional network model that improves disease association verification accuracy through regularized partial correlation, and identifies and visualizes disease clusters in non-temporal and temporal dimensions. Among 54,284 depressed patients in Sweden and an independent cohort of the British Biobank, 6 robust follow-up disease clusters across diagnosis and time (central nervous system, respiratory, cardiovascular and metabolic, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal and mental disorders) were simultaneously identified, covering a total of 30 diseases. The polygenic risk score showed a dose-response relationship. GWAS further unearthed 8 drug-targetable significant genome-wide loci in 4 clusters, providing for the first time a shared and specific genetic intervention roadmap for the common prevention of multiple diseases after depression.

　　Author information: Professor Song Huan is the corresponding author, and the Med-X Informatics Center of Sichuan University and the West China Biomedical Big Data Center of West China Hospital of Sichuan University are the core completion units.

　　5. BMC Medicine (IF=8.3): It is suggested that adverse life events can cumulatively increase the risk of acute post-traumatic disorder.

　　Thesis title: Association of childhood maltreatment and adverse lifetime experiences with post-injury psychopathology: evidence from the China Severe Trauma Cohort

　　Core Highlights: Post-traumatic psychopathology is a "hidden complication" that has been neglected in clinical practice for a long time. Existing research mostly focuses on genetics or acute stress, but insufficient attention is paid to the intervenable link of life history. This study relies on a high-quality, multi-dimensional, and time-clear Chinese acute major trauma cohort and finds that regardless of genetic background, childhood abuse and subsequent accumulated adverse life experiences independently and additively increase the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression, among which emotional abuse and "life-threatening illness/injury" have the strongest effects; more importantly, adverse adult events can explain about 1/4 of the "childhood abuse → post-injury symptoms" path, suggesting that experiences in adulthood are core mediators that can be blocked. This discovery incorporates "life history" into the psychological risk stratification of trauma, providing a new low-cost prevention and control idea of "history-risk assessment-early intervention" for trauma patients admitted to the hospital.

　　Author information: Professor Song Huan, Professor Zhang Wei, and Professor Wang Guanglin are the co-corresponding authors, and the Trauma Medicine Center of West China Hospital of Sichuan University, the Med-X Informatics Center of Sichuan University, and the Biomedical Big Data Center of West China Hospital of Sichuan University are the core completion units.

　　Introduction to Professor Song Huan:

　　Professor Song Huan, doctoral supervisor, researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Big Data, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, and chief scientist of "Medical Big Data", a double-first-class advanced deployment discipline of Sichuan University. A national-level young talent, approved as an academic and technical leader by the Sichuan Provincial Health Commission. Served as academic editor of Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and youth editorial board member of Phenomics. So far, he has published more than 80 articles as the first/corresponding author, and his representative works have been published in top international medical journals such as JAMA, BMJ, Nature Communications, JAMA Psychiatry, JAMA Neurology, Lancet Regional Health-Europe, American Journal of Psychiatry, Lancet Healthy Longevity, European Journal of Epidemiology, Molecular Psychiatry, and International Journal of Epidemiology. It has received a number of scientific research funds including national natural science projects, key R&D projects of the Sichuan Provincial Department of Science and Technology, Swedish Karolinska Research Fund, and horizontal achievement transformation projects.