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News

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Twitter feed from @_yzlab

  • July 1st, 2025: Congratulations to Luyang on being selected to speak at the ISMB/ECCB 2025 joint conference and on winning a conference fellowship.

  • June 5th, 2025: Congratulations to Luyang, who has been selected to give a talk at the South-West RNA Club annual meeting 2025.

  • December 10th, 2024: Congratulations to Birong for successfully passing her PhD viva!

  • December 6th, 2024: Birong was selected to give a seminar at the EMBL-EBI-AstraZeneca workshop.

  • August 29th, 2024: Congratulations to Dien for successfully passing his PhD viva!

  • March 29th, 2024: Congratulations to Dien, who was selected to give a talk at the APASL 2024 annual meeting and won an Investigator Award.

  • March 1st, 2024: Congratulations to Wei for winning the European Association for the Study of Obesity Travel Grant and being selected to give a talk at the 31st European Congress on Obesity annual meeting.

  • November 27th, 2023: Dien’s review on Complement and NAFLD has been published in Liver International.

  • October 25th, 2023: Congratulations to Birong, who was selected as a finalist for the PGR Student Excellence Award for Innovation!

Research

The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms.
- Lao Tzu (604 BC - 531 BC)

The scientific history of our world begins with observations of regularities in nature. Without Tycho’s meticulous record-keeping of 1,006 stars, Kepler would not have been able to come up with his three laws of planetary motion in the universe. In health research, we still await available and agreed notions of what underlying regularities exist. Today, rapid advances in high-throughput technologies and the explosion of biomedical data allow us to approach this challenge in new and creative ways. By identifying patterns hidden within complex datasets, we can transform how we understand disease and ultimately improve human health. Our lab’s long-term goal is to develop and apply innovative systems biology approaches for disease diagnostics and therapeutics. We focus on harnessing and integrating diverse data types (omics, clinical, and molecular) to build a holistic understanding of disease onset and progression. To achieve this, we pursue three interconnected research directions:

  1. Developing AI tools for single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and drug repurposing.
  2. Decoding chronic disease mechanisms through large-scale data mining and multi-omics integration, in combination with molecular and cellular biology techniques.
  3. Building AI-driven methods to combine medical images with clinical variables for earlier and more accurate diagnosis.

While a major focus of our work is fatty liver disease, our computational and systems approaches extend broadly to complex diseases where inflammation and metabolism intersect. By combining advanced computational tools with biological insights, we aim to illuminate disease mechanisms and accelerate the translation of data into diagnostics and therapeutics.

Fusion-Guided Multimodal Imaging and Biomarker Platform for Precision Diagnosis

Computational Drug Repurposing

Complement System: Bridging Immunity and Metabolism

Recent Publications

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Google Scholar

#: co-first author; *: Corresponding author

  1. M. Goepp, J.V. Milburn, B. Zhang, Y. Dong, V. Tyrrell, X. Zheng, J.M. Marshall, S. Bolsega, M. Basic, L. Glendinning, G.T. Ho, J. Satsangi, R.M. Breyer, S. Narumiya, H.J. McSorley, J.K.J. Schwarze, C.J. Anderson, D.H. Dockrell, A.G. Rossi, A. Bleich, C.D. Lucas, V.B. O’Donnell, D. Mole, M.J. Arends, Y. Zhou, C. Yao, Age-related impairment of intestinal inflammation resolution through an eicosanoid-immune-microbiota axis, Cell Host Microbe 33 (2025) 671-687 e676.
  2. S. Pauli, N. Oliveras-Canellas, J.M. Moreno-Navarrete, A. Castells-Nobau, F.J. Ortega, J.I. Rodriguez-Hermosa, E. Castro, B. Zhang, Y. Zhou, J. Gomez-Ambrosi, A.B. Crujeiras, O.A. Rangel-Zuniga, L. Garrido-Sanchez, S. Becerril, M. Pardo, J.L. Romero-Cabrera, C. Gutierrez-Repiso, M.C. Carreira, M. Macias-Gonzalez, M.A. Martinez-Olmos, G. Fruhbeck, L.M. Seoane, J. Lopez-Miranda, F.J. Tinahones, C. Dieguez, J. Mayneris-Perxachs, J.M. Fernandez-Real, Cellular composition and transcriptomics of subcutaneous adipose tissue linked to blood glycated haemoglobin, Eur J Clin Invest (2025) e70033.
  3. L. Zhou, J. Liu, P. Yao, X. Liu, F. Chen, Y. Chen, L. Zhou, C. Shen*, Y. Zhou*, X. Du*, J. Hu*, Spatial transcriptomics reveals unique metabolic profile and key oncogenic regulators of cervical squamous cell carcinoma, J Transl Med 22 (2024) 1163.
  4. V.D. Nguyen, T.R. Hughes, Y. Zhou, From complement to complosome in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: When location matters, Liver Int 44 (2024) 316-329.
  5. B. Hu, Y. Yin, B. Zhang, S. Li, K. Li, Y. Zhou*, Q. Huang*, Villin-1 regulates ferroptosis in colorectal cancer progression, FEBS J (2024).

People

We are growing! Reach out if you are interested in joining us.

Principal Investigator

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You (YoYo) Zhou

PI

Members

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Adrian Iliescu

PhD student

Complement System, Fatty Liver Disease, Systems Biology, metabolic inflammation, immunology, cellular and molecular biology

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Wei Hang

PhD student

Single Cell Sequencing, Osteoarthritis, Obesity

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Joel Downward

Professional student

Bioinformatics, Fatty liver disease

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Luyang Li

PhD student

RNA splicing, Single-cell sequencing, Large language model

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Shenglei Fang

PhD student

Computing Science, Machine Learning, Liver Disease

Alumni

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Birong Zhang

PhD@2025

Research Fellow

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David Li

MBCCH&Professional Student

Academic Clinical Fellow at Nottingham University Hospital

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Van Dien Nguyen

PhD@2024

Consultant at the Department of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Vietnam Military Medical University

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Kayla Chan

Software Engineer at Investec Bank

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Nick Hodson

Medical doctor at Royal Glamorgan hospital

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Sarah Clarke

PhD@2022

Experimental Physician at the AstraZeneca

Resources

Developed by YZ lab

Softwares

FAB-OAOB: Fibroblast Atlas Browser of scRNAseq in OsteoArthritis-OBesity

SODIUM: Sum Of Deviations in Inverse Universal Mapping for Drug Repurposing

NASH App: An open-source data portal to overview the molecular landscape of Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis


Documentations

 Teaching Materials: Master Programmes in Bioinformatics/Clinical Immunology (Internal only)
Recommended Readings: (Internal only)

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