Reef Cnidaria and Porifera as Sources of Bioactive Secondary Metabolites—Honoring the 70th Birthday of Professor Yang-Chang Wu

Dear Colleagues,

Please join us in extending, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, our congratulations to Professor Yang-Chang Wu, who has for many decades been a pioneer in the field of natural product chemistry and marine drugs. It is a great pleasure and honor for us to announce a new Special Issue of Marine Drugs to celebrate Professor Wu’s achievements.

Professor Yang-Chang Wu was born in Chiayi City, Taiwan in 1951. He received his Ph.D. in pharmacognosy from the College of Pharmacy, Kaohsiung Medical University (KMU), Taiwan, under the supervision of the late Professor Sheng-The Lu in 1986. After working as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Yoshimasa Hirata at Meijo University, Japan, and Professor Kuo-Hsiung Lee at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, USA, from 1986 to 1987, in 1990 he became professor at the College of Pharmacy, KMU, and director of the Graduate Institute of Natural Products (GINP) from 1992 to 2006. Later, he served as the dean of the Office of Research and Development at KMU from 2006 to 2009. Due to his significant contribution to research on natural products, he was selected as the chair professor and vice-president as well as dean of the School of Pharmacy at China Medical University (CMU), Taiwan, from 2010 to 2017. In 2017, he returned to KMU and served as the Chair Professor of the GINP. In 2019, he returned to CMU and served as the Chair Professor of the Graduate Institute of Integrated Medicine and Director of the Chinese Medicine Research and Development Center.

In 2007 and 2010, he was awarded by the Ming-Ning Wang and TienTe Lee Foundations for outstanding merit and high scholastic achievement of medical and pharmaceutical research, respectively. In 2009, he received the National Science Council Outstanding Research Outstanding Research Award in Taiwan.

Professor Wu has served as an editorial board number of 6 journals and a referee for about 40 journals. He is also an outstanding member of the American Society of Pharmacognosy. To date, Prof. Wu has published more than 610 research articles in SCI journals, has been granted more than 40 patents, and has cooperated with more 20 industry-academic organizations. Prof. Wu has transferred six patents/technologies to the industry.

In the beginning of 2021, he will be 70 years old. One’s 70th birthday is a significant milestone among Taiwanese people, often cited as the “Years from the Heart” in the Taiwanese language, which originally came from a Chinese classic, The Analects of Confucius, written about 2600 years ago by Confucius. Professor Wu is still quite active as a scientist following his move to CMU in 2019, as a Director of the Chinese Medicine Research and Development Center. As a result, we can find a number of his former colleagues and students in the fields of academia and industry. On behalf of Prof. Wu’s former and present colleagues and students, then, I would like to express our sincerest wishes for a happy “Years from the Heart” and a fruitful new decade in his life. In this Special Issue of Marine Drugs, some of these colleagues will contribute their most interesting research results in marine natural product chemistry.

This Special Issue, which is titled “Reef Cnidaria and Porifera as Sources of Bioactive Secondary Metabolites”, will focus on the diversity of chemical structures and biomedical activities of the natural products found in marine invertebrates, which have attracted the attention of researchers in the field of natural product chemistry. After nearly 40 years of research, considerable progress and development in various biomedical applications have been made. The cnidarians and sponges (Porifera) in coral reef areas have evolved to produce highly complex marine natural products due to their vast biological diversity and have been proven to be the most abundant source of marine natural compounds. These compounds have been shown to have a wide range of biomedical activities, such as cytotoxicity, anti-inflammation, antimicrobial activity, etc. The main purpose of this Special Issue, thus, is to explore the structural analysis and biological activity of the natural compounds contained in cnidaria and seawater sponges (Porifera) from coral reef areas.

Prof. Dr. Yang-Chang Wu
Prof. Dr. Ping-Jyun Sung
Prof. Dr. Yuan-Bin Cheng
Guest Editors

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• Cnidaria
• Porifera
• Coral reef
• Structure determination
• Sponge