Lugui Qiu
State Key Laboratory of Experimental Hematology, Lymphoma and Myeloma Center, Institute of Hematology & Blood Diseases Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences
Email: qiulg@ihcams.ac.cn
At 11:37 on March 27, 2022, Dr. Jianfeng Zhou, a renowned hematologist in China and a leader in the field of CAR-T treatment in hematological tumors, died unexpectedly at the age of 56 because of sudden coronary dissection rupture (acute myocardial infarction secondary to spontaneous coronary artery dissection).
I have known Jianfeng for >20 years (Figs. 1 and 2), he was one of the most outstanding, compassionate, and hard-working clinician-scientist I have come across with. He dedicated his career to improving healthcare outcomes for every patient in his care, as well as to medical innovations that brought novel treatments to hundreds of thousands more patients.
Figure 1.
Jianfeng Zhou at the Second International Union Forum on Lymphoma, Tianjin, China, 2015.
Figure 2.
Jianfeng Zhou (left) and Lugui Qiu (right) at the 20th anniversary of Lymphoma and Myeloma Center, Institute of Hematology and Blood Diseases Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, 2020.
Dr. Jianfeng Zhou was awarded his PhD degree from the Institute of Hematology, Tongji Medical University in 1997. From 1998 to 2001, he completed his postdoctoral training in the Medical Center of the University of Illinois at the United States. After returning to China in 2001, he was appointed as the director of the Department of Hematology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and led the team to pursue primarily on molecular diagnosis and therapy, and cellular immunotherapy of hematological malignancies focusing on leukemia and lymphoma. At that time, there was a huge gap between China and developed countries in the field of lymphoma diagnosis, classification and treatment. To fill this gap, Jianfeng committed his life to fundamental research, clinical diagnosis and treatment, and translational research in lymphoma and related fields, and achieved numerous major breakthroughs in Epstein-Barr (EB) virus-related lymphoma and CAR-T cell therapy. In October 2015, Jianfeng’s team successfully implemented the first CAR-T therapy in central China to treat recurrent acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Since 2016, they have successfully applied CAR-T therapy to recurrent and refractory lymphoma and multiple myeloma in >600 patients from numbers of countries and regions.
During early 2020, the most severe time of the pandemic in Wuhan, Jianfeng provided online clinical service to patients with hematological tumors through multiple platforms, led a team formed by multidisciplinary doctors in Tongji Hospital to complete 7 studies related to COVID-19 within 4 months, and published a series of groundbreaking results. One of them is that they pioneered in using cytokine inhibitors in treatment of COVID-19 patients, which was broadly reported in international medical media and newspapers.
Jianfeng held leadership positions in many professional associations, such as current president of Hematology and Oncology Branch in China Anti-Cancer Association, Vice President of the Blood Oncology Branch in Chinese Association of Integrative Medicine, and Vice Chairman of China Anti-Leukemia Alliance of Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology. His significant research achievements are reflected by his record of >100 peer-reviewed published scientific articles, including Nature Genetics, J Exp Med, Cell Research, Blood, JACI, JNCI, Leukemia, etc. His recent achievement, “Prevention and treatment of hepatitis B virus reactivation after CAR T-cell therapy” and “A series of studies of a novel fully human B-Cell maturation antigen-specific CAR-T cells (CT103A) in patients with relapsed and/or refractory multiple myeloma,” were continuously selected for China’s top 10 hematological advances in 2020 and 2021, and was commented as “a forward step in multiple myeloma immunotherapies.”
Dr. Jianfeng Zhou, a pioneering explorer of the immune-therapy, especially in the diagnosis and treatment of EBV-related lymphoma, left far too early. We will miss him more than words can say.
Weiping Yuan
State Key Laboratory of Experimental Hematology, Institute of Hematology & Blood, Diseases Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical, College
Email: wpyuan@ihcams.ac.cn
On March 27, I was told by my former student the sad news that Dr. Jianfeng Zhou left us due to sudden illness, a great loss for the hematology society of China. As a longtime collaborator and friend of Dr. Zhou, I was shocked by the news and my deepest condolences goes to his family and his colleagues. I knew Dr. Zhou for more than a decade starting from a cooperative research project to study the role of mTORC2 in AML in 2010. Since then, he sent 7 MD/PhD students in a 10-year period to my laboratory to work on mTORC2 and later MBD2 projects with about 11 co-publications. The latest one was just published in Oncogenesis in November 2021. As a physician scientist, he understood the importance of basic research for the clinical advancement, and thus contribute to the collaborative research with his talented students, grant support, scientific ideas and sagacity, and most importantly, his time. I was really amazed by his efficiency to be the head of the hematology department of 300+ beds with huge administrative responsibilities while still find time to lead clinical and basic research projects, give lectures or speeches every week in multiple occasions, and still share serious or fun topics with blogs such as research progress, patient recovery, good food to eat, or interesting but peaceful place to stay. We will miss him as a great physician scientist and as a good friend!
Gang Huang
UT Health San Antonio, Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine, Mays Cancer Center at UT Health San Antonio
Email: huangg1@uthscsa.edu
Due to a sudden illness, Dr. Jianfeng Zhou passed away at home on March 27. It was a great shock and irreversible loss for his family, students, colleagues, collaborators, and most importantly, his patients. It is a huge loss for the hematology field as well.
As a close collaborator and friend of Dr. Zhou for a decade, I was always amazed by his passion for the moments and his compassion for his patients. Besides his busy daily work in the clinic, and his work on the research as a devoted physician scientist, Dr. Zhou is a person with exceptional passion. He was a romantic poet and food connoisseur. He is best known for his routine updating his “Moments,” which is WeChat’s system for a social feed, updated by friends. Dr. Zhou utilized this interactive platform, allowing him to post many images, text, short videos, and share articles and music with his friends. Although his time to share the “Moments” was usually late at night after his long day of work, his friends could always sense his deep passion for many things: pets, foods, poetries, novels, or new progresses of science. One could always feel his passion for life and for what he was doing when reading his update or interacting with him in person. Even when sharing some bad news, he would always finish his “Moments,” with a high note to fight through. This kind of positivity and toughness might be part of the reason why he used “Iron Man” as his nickname. Among the amazing and energetic character traits, that were the foundation for the passionate personality he had, there was always a deep compassion for his patients. Besides existing standard of cares, he would always look for new therapies, or new clinical trials for his refectory or relapsed cancer patients who seemed to run out of options. Beyond sympathy to those hapless patients, his great compassion for others has led to many miracle recoveries. His touching notes to those lucky ones was: “the world has kissed your soul with its pain, asking for its return in songs,” please enjoy the hustle and bustle of the normal daily life, as living itself is a wonderful thing.”
All those who knew him, will deeply miss him as a friend, gentleman, poet, gourmet, knight, physician scientist, and especially as a human with great passion and compassion.
Liang Huang
Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
Email: lhuang@tjh.tjmu.edu.cn
Dr. Zhou was my mentor, an extraordinary scientist, and a cherished leader (Fig. 3). I still remember the feeling of admiration when I met him for the first time, and infinite expectations from the warm eyes of a kind elder for his younger generation. As a mentor, Dr. Zhou was always available for discussion on scientific projects. The laboratory meeting at every Sunday night has been going on for decades, rain or shine. He was extremely rigorous without losing imaginations, his experiences in solving scientific problems helped shape my way of thinking and style of mentorship. Today, when I teach my students or come across tricky scientific questions, I frequently find myself wondering, “What would Dr. Zhou do?” Dr. Zhou has always been unassuming and never stand on his dignity. On a personal note, when I got along with him, I felt that he was more like a friend who can learn from each other and make progress together.
Figure 3.
Liang Huang (first from left), Jianfeng Zhou (first from right) and the team.
Dr. Zhou truly loved work and life in general. He devoted countless hours to his work and was always ready for helping everyone in our team. On the other hand, Dr. Zhou’s passion for his family, friends, pets, delicious food, modern poetry, and kung-fu novels was well known. He was a gifted mentor, an outstanding scientist, and a wonderful human being. Learning from him was one of the best decisions of my life. I miss him deeply.
Footnotes
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.