Bingfang Yan was just 17 when his rural village in China relied on him for rationing its food, electricity, and basic necessities. The 500 residents in the poor farming community had faith in his intelligence, diligence, and integrity. At the time, he was the only one in the village who had finished high school.
Now, 28 years later, public health officials, doctors, and students in the global village rely on the pharmacy professor’s research, which focuses on how our genes and environment affect the way we metabolize drugs.
Yan’s recently published findings regarding Tamiflu’s interaction with the anti-clotting drug Plavix piqued the interest of federal health officials and national media.
His study, published in the December 2006 issue of The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, showed the concurrent use of both drugs would likely make Tamiflu therapeutically inactive. Federal officials took note of the findings because Tamiflu is considered one of the key weapons in the battle against an influenza pandemic. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has asked the biomedical scientist to expand this study.
Yan’s major research areas—gene-based alteration of drug metabolism; drugs, herbs, hormones and their interactions; stages of cancer development; and gene regulation—are interrelated. His team of post-doctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students work diligently on some of the most important health issues of the day: mechanisms of tumor formation and therapies of diseases and conditions such as diabetes, influenza, and high cholesterol.
“Dr. Yan has an indomitable spirit,” said Donald E. Letendre, dean of the College of Pharmacy. “The obstacles he has been able to overcome to achieve his many and varied successes are quite extraordinary. His work as a researcher, scholar, and educator best represents the spirit of discovery and commitment to high professional and educational ideals to which colleges and universities aspire. We are truly fortunate to have Dr. Yan here at the college and the University. He is one of the key threads in the fabric we are trying to weave that brings together student and faculty excellence, as well as quality patient care.”
Hard work, attention to detail, and formal education began when Yan was a boy in China. The oldest son in a family of six children, Yan was placed in school at age 5, two years before the customary starting age. “My father was a busy carpenter and my mother worked in the field all day long, so there was no one to take care of me and my siblings,” Yan said. “So my father took me to the school and told the officials I had to be enrolled. Luckily, I passed all the tests, but I was younger than everyone else. Contrary to expectations, I made sufficient progress to keep up with the class.”
In 1978, Yan enrolled in the Huazhong Agricultural School of Veterinary Medicine, becoming a doctor of veterinary medicine in 1982. He taught microbiology and immunology there until 1988. He also earned a master’s degree in microbiology and immunology at China’s Nanjing Agricultural University. He came to this country to pursue graduate studies.
After a year at New York Medical College, he transferred to the University of Kansas School of Medicine, earning his doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology in 1994. He remained there as a research professor through 1996, then joined the URI faculty in 1997.
Now the director of the URI Center for Pharmacogenomics, Yan runs a cutting-edge lab while carrying a full teaching load. He teaches immunology and molecular genetics to undergraduates, and pharmaceutical biotechnology, signaling transduction in cells (the transfer of genetic material from one cell to another), and drug metabolism to graduate students. Yan has also been a mentor to biomedical scientists in both the College of Pharmacy and the College of the Environment and Life Sciences.
“We attract bright and talented students to the College of Pharmacy, and I enjoy interacting with them. They know I am a pretty funny guy too,” Yan said. “It is important that we provide students with a solid first level of instruction because things are changing so fast.”
Yan has been widely recognized for his work. He has received $3.7 million in top priority research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was awarded a Molecular Biology Specialty Section Award by the Society of Toxicology, a Career Development Award by NIH, and a New Investigator Award by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.
One area of Yan’s research examines human enzymes such as carboxylesterases, their genetic variants, and their impact on medications. “We are looking at what happens in the genes that render certain medications effective, ineffective, or toxic. If we can do that, drugs will be given only to the patients who therapeutically respond to them.”
Yan said work that he and others are doing could be called the infancy stage of individualized prescriptions. “We are all different, so why not have medicines that are customized to respond to those differences?
“The framework has to change from a focus on safe medicines to a focus on safe patients. It is impossible to make a safe drug for everyone. Now, the FDA wants to talk with us about why Tamiflu may lead to neuro-behavior issues in a small number of people.” A specific gene activates Tamiflu, but some patients do not possess it, the researcher explained. For those individuals there is a toxic buildup in the brain.
A husband and father of two, Yan is also doing extensive research on how drugs, herbs, and hormones interact. “Across the world, herbal remedies are becoming very popular. As much as 80 percent of the world’s population is using natural remedies; in this country, herbal medicine use is growing by 20 percent per year.”
Yet, herbal medicines come with their own risks. “A cancer patient suffering from depression who takes St. John’s Wort, which contains the active ingredient hyperforin, can render her anti-cancer drugs useless and can actually speed up the cancer process.
“We are looking at these kinds of drug interactions at the molecular levels,” Yan said. “These studies are directly related to our health.”
By Dave Lavallee ’79, M.P.A ’87
Photo by Michael Salerno
