Zhenpeng Qiu
Pharmacologist and Professor at Hubei University of Chinese Medicine who studies how natural medicines act on liver and kidney disease, including fatty liver disease and drug-induced organ damage
Professor and doctoral supervisor, School of Pharmacy, Hubei University of Chinese Medicine (since 2023) · Associate Professor (2021–2023) · Visiting scholar, University of Minnesota Medical School (2019–2020) · Lecturer (2015–2018) · PhD in Basic Medicine, Wuhan University (2014)
School of Pharmacy, Hubei University of Chinese Medicine (Wuhan, Hubei, China) ↗
Zhenpeng Qiu was senior author of a 2026 Atlas study on tacrolimus, a drug given after organ transplants to stop the immune system from rejecting the new organ (GAO2026). Over years of use, tacrolimus slowly damages the kidneys. In mice and kidney cells, the team found that astragaloside IV, a compound from the medicinal plant Astragalus, protected the kidney by turning down mTOR. With mTOR quieter, the transcription factor TFEB moved into the nucleus and switched on autophagy, the cell's recycling system, which tacrolimus had suppressed. The authors point to the mTOR-TFEB-GADD45alpha axis as a possible drug target. This is preclinical work, with no data from patients.
Qiu trained in pharmacy at South-Central Minzu University and earned a PhD in Basic Medicine at Wuhan University in 2014. Qiu joined the School of Pharmacy at Hubei University of Chinese Medicine as a lecturer in 2015, spent 2019 to 2020 as a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and became a professor and doctoral supervisor in 2023.
According to the university profile, Qiu's group works on the molecular pharmacology and toxicology of natural medicines and traditional Chinese medicine, with a main focus on chronic liver disease: fatty liver disease, the inflammatory form called steatohepatitis, and liver cancer that grows out of it, as well as fatty acid metabolism in metabolic disease.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | A | Astragaloside IV Mitigates Tacrolimus-Induced Chronic Nephrotoxicity by Regulating the mTOR-TFEB-GADD45α Pathway. GAO2026 Senior author: led the mouse and cell study showing that astragaloside IV protects the kidney from tacrolimus by lowering mTOR and restoring TFEB-driven autophagy. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Zhenpeng Qiu.
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- Peng Gao Directs the Northwestern metabolomics core that supplied mass-spectrometry metabolite measurements for three Ben-Sahra lab studies on how mTORC1 and ERK signalling drive nucleotide and SAM synthesis.
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