Professor Seung-Woo Lee’s Research from POSTECH Wins the 2020 Excellence Award from the Ministry of Education

The research project of Professor Seung-Woo Lee of POSTECH’s Department of Life Science was selected as the 2020 Excellence Award from Korea’s Ministry of Education.

Korea’s Ministry of Education selected the 50 excellent academic and research projects of 2020 and held the award ceremony at the National Research Foundation’s headquarters in Daejeon on December 17.

Since 2006, the Ministry of Education has been announcing outstanding achievements every year to publicize the accomplishments of its academic research support projects that have contributed to advancing academics and solving social problems. This year, 156 out of 21,505 academic and research projects conducted in 2019 were reviewed by evaluators consisting of experts in each field of study. Through this, 30 outstanding projects in the field of humanities and society, 5 in the field of Korean studies, and 15 in the field of science and engineering have been chosen as winners.

Professor Lee’s research, which was selected as an outstanding achievement in the field of science and engineering, revealed that the microbial signals in the intestines are transmitted across the intestines to the whole body and that they produce immune cells by controlling the hematopoietic action in the bone marrow without causing excessive inflammatory reactions under normal conditions.

During this process, microbial signals containing the DNA of intestinal microorganisms are transmitted through the bloodstream to the bone marrow and recognized by CX3CR1+ to interact with hematopoietic cells, and the mechanism was identified for controlling systemic responses in normal intestinal microbial signals.

This research result was highly praised for providing important clues to the fundamental question of how the microorganisms in the intestine affect the control of immune homeostasis in various tissues, and even in diseases like cancer.