Recently, a paper authored by Deng Yanjun, an undergraduate of Chengdu University (CDU), was shortlisted to the 2021 Frontrunner 5000 list for Top Articles in Outstanding S&T Journal of China (hereafter referred to as "the F5000 list"), which is released by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, an organization affiliated with the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China. The paper, entitled Study on Active Compounds from Huoxiang Zhengqi Oral Liquid for Prevention of COVID-19 Based on Network Pharmacology and Molecular Docking, was published on Chinese Traditional and Herbal Drugs. For the first time, a paper published by a CDU undergraduate student as the first author has been included in this list. This paper is supervised by Research Fellow Liu Tao, who is included in the university's talent pool of outstanding innovation and entrepreneurship mentors.
In recent years, CDU has built a talent pool of outstanding innovation and entrepreneurship mentors and recruited such talent from all walks of life and college teachers with profound theoretical knowledge and practical experience in batches to form a mentor pool. The first batch includes 35 mentors, all professors with doctoral degrees and major projects. The mentor pool is developed with four categories: industrial planning, technological innovation, competition guidance, and industry service. The mentors offer entrepreneurship consulting services, competition guidance, and others based on their own expertise, so as to improve the quality of entrepreneurship and innovation services and enhance college students' awareness of innovation and entrepreneurship and their ability to do so, thus improving the quality of talent training in the university.
In the early stage of COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020, Liu's research team focused on Huoxiang Zhengqi Oral Liquid, a representative drug recommended by the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China for the prevention and treatment of diarrhea caused by the coronavirus. They delved into it using network pharmacology and molecular docking methods, finally clarifying its possible active substance basis for the prevention and treatment of the disease, target, and regulatory signaling pathway, with the drug's efficacy and treatment mechanism preliminarily confirmed. The result was published online on February 23, 2020, providing a reference for further applying TCM to fight the COVID-19 pandemic at that time.
Based on this paper, the entrepreneurship project "Re-evaluation Research on Chinese Patent Medicine Series Preparations" was registered in the 7th and 8th Sichuan International College Students' "Internet+" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition and won one provincial silver award and one bronze award, respectively. Also, the project was granted the second prize at the national level in the China Undergraduate Life Science Contest (CULSC).
The selected papers must be published in excellent journals with their citations ranked 1% in corresponding disciplines, as required by the F5000 list. Also, they should be linked to the SCI database for single-platform literature linkage and global citation retrievals, thus sharing and promoting China's significant achievement in science in a wider range, namely, to the international scientific community.
