Biophysical Society Bulletin | June 2018

Biophysicist in Profile

Jack Diwu Areas of Research Real time monitoring of cellular events by fluorescence

Company AAT Bioquest

At-a-Glance

Jack Diwu would not have chosen to study chemistry if he had been given another option, but he quickly came to love the subject. Since his time in graduate school he has pursued his scientific passions, making moves in his career to follow research that interested him. In 2006 he founded AAT Bioquest, where, he says, “It has been my greatest pleasure to see our products being used by scientists for their research projects.”

Jack Diwu

Zhenjun “Jack” Diwu , founder, President, and CEO of AAT Bioquest, grew up in Xianyang, a small city close to Xi’an, the capital city of Shaanxi Province in China. Xianyang is situated on the north bank of the Wei River about 12 miles northwest of Xi’an, in an area that was the cradle of early Chinese civili- zation. Its historical importance began with the Qin state. All of China was united under the Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE) for the first time in Chinese history. “My early interest in Chinese history, literature, and political science might be related to the rich history of my birth place,” he shares. In his younger years, Diwu was much more interested in these subjects than in science, which may have had as much to do with his natural curiosity as it did the larger cultural moment in which he was growing up. “The entire Chinese society was ignoring the nat- ural sciences at the time,” he says. “I started to have a strong interest in science and engineering once Xiaoping Deng started his reform in China. Before Deng’s reform, there were few opportunities in science and technologies in China. Scientists and educators were unfairly treated in China in the 1970s, which had a very negative influence on my earlier interests in science as it did on other young people of my generation.” After Deng had begun his education system reform in the late 1970s, Diwu was enrolled into Northwest University in Xian, China. He was assigned to the Department of Chemistry, though he had a stronger interest in math and engineering. “You must go with your assignment by the government at the time in China, thus I started my scientific career with chemis- try. When I started my chemistry major with Northwest Uni- versity in 1980, I might have had the poorest scores among all my classmates,” he says. “Fortunately, I started to have a strong interest in chemistry, and thus I quickly caught up with my grades. By the time of my college graduation in 1984, I had become one of the top students.” That same year, he enrolled in graduate school at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. At this prestigious research institution, Diwu had access to many resources he had not been able to access at Northwest University. He read multiple

newspapers each day, and one day in the Guangming Daily came across an intriguing article about Linjin Jiang’s research on photobiology. This proved to be fortuitous, and he began his biophysics career in Jiang’s lab. “Her lab research focused on photochemistry, photophysics, and photobiology,” he says. “My strong background in math and chemistry played a significant role in my early success in her lab.” He studied the phototherapeutic mechanism of hyporcrellins, a group of natural pigments isolated from a fungus grown in Yunnan Province, China. Following completion of his PhD in 1988, Diwu wanted to continue this research, and sought out a postdoctoral posi- tion with William Lown at University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. In his first year there, he focused on investigating the essential photophysical and biological properties of perylen- equinoid compounds. “Some of exceptional properties of hypocrellin B discovered in Dr. Lown’s lab were particularly in- triguing. We decided to explore its phototherapeutic potential in my last two years of postdoctoral work,” he explains. Over the next two years, his priority was to explore the anti-cancer applications of hypocrellin B by collaborating with the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton. A pharmaceutical company, SonoLight Pharmaceutical, was formed based on Diwu’s research, in order to further explore the commercial poten- tial of the light-activated or ultrasound-activated anticancer and anti-HIV applications of hypocrellin B. Later, SonoLight merged with Alta Pharma to form Quest Pharmaceuticals, which is still actively exploring the various applications of hypocrellin B and its derivatives for anticancer, antiviral, and cosmetic applications. One day during his time in Lown’s lab, Diwu was reading a business journal that featured a report on a small biotechnol- ogy firm, Molecular Probes, based in Eugene, Oregon. “The ar- ticle reminded me my deep interest in fluorescence. I decided to write to Dr. Richard Haugland , the founder and president of Molecular Probes. To my surprise Dr. Haugland immediately wrote me back with an invitation for an on-site job interview.

June 2018

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