Professor Yan Chen

Department of Bone and Joint Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, China

Dr. Chen is an Associate Professor and Associate Physician at Guangxi Medical University. During his PhD study at Columbia University and the University of Hong Kong, he demonstrated the important role of subchondral bone remodeling in the pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment of osteoarthritis. Of note, using the Individual Trabecula Segmentation (ITS) technique which can divide the whole bone into individual trabecular plates and trabecular rods, he showed that the development of osteoarthritis is attributable to trabecular rod loss and trabecular plate thickening, which leads to uneven mechanical distribution of the subchondral bone. At the cellular and molecular levels, he found that the uncoupled bone formation with bone resorption triggered by TGF-β1 signaling pathway contributes to the abnormal subchondral bone remodeling.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Guangxi Medical University and the University of Hong Kong, he demonstrated that controlled remote continuous microinjuries (such as bone transport) can be used to stimulate the intrinsic repair ability of the body, which enhances the repair of the localized tissue, and, more importantly, the target tissues. Thus, he proposed the theory of "microinjury-induced remote repair (MIRR)". Furthermore, he defined that the microinjuries should have several characteristics: first, they should be microinjuries so they can trigger the production of pro-regenerative cytokines while being minimally invasive and avoiding severe tissue damage which may be difficult to heal themselves or heal with scar formation; second, the microinjuries should be continuous so they can stimulate persistent cytokine release which can match the healing process of the target tissues. This also indicates that the microinjuries should be controllable or suitable for self-administration by patients; third, the microinjuries can be distant to the target damaged tissues hence they will not cause further injuries to the target tissues. In addition, he showed that the microinjury-triggered cytokines promoted the proliferation and migration of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) to the target tissue via activation of the Ras/Raf/MEK/ERK pathway and HIF-1α, further revealing the mechanism of the theory.

Dr. Chen has won more than 10 academic awards including: Best Paper Award of Chinese Orthopaedic Association (COA) (twice) and of Hong Kong Orthopaedic Association (HKOA); Young Investigator Award of International Chinese Musculoskeletal Research Society- American Society of Bone and Mineral Research (ICMRS-ASBMR); Travel Grant of (COA), of HKOA, and of ASBMR; and Future Star Award of Guangxi Orthopaedic Association. In addition, Dr. Chen has served on the editorial boards of several journals and reviewed articles for more than 30 journals.

Updated 15 April 2025