Nam-Hyung Kim Academician of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology

Wuyi University

Dr. Kim earned his Ph.D. from Oregon State University and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia under the USDA's Food for the 21st Century program.

Upon returning to Korea, Dr. Kim worked at Chungbuk National University, where he gained extensive experience in mammalian oocyte in vitro maturation, embryo development, transgenic animal production, stem cell research, and organoid production. He served as the Director of the National Key Laboratory of Molecular Embryology, President of the Korean Society for Animal Reproduction, and Head of the Transgenic Organ Xenotransplantation Project. In 2006, he became the youngest member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology. By 2011, he was leading a major national project in Korea focused on the development of animal biopharmaceuticals and organs with a budget of approximately $70 million. This project aimed at developing animal bioreactors, producing transgenic animals for xenotransplantation, and developing and commercializing biopharmaceuticals.

Dr. Kim has published over 350 SCI-indexed international papers and holds more than 20 patents. He has supervised over 30 Chinese graduate and postdoctoral students, with 85% of his papers involving his Chinese students. His research achievements include the first successful production of cloned transgenic pigs and cattle in Korea in 2003, the production of red fluorescent transgenic pigs, transgenic chickens, disease model transgenic dogs, tetracycline-regulated gene expression transgenic cloned pigs, and green fluorescent protein transgenic Hanwoo cattle using FIV lentiviral vectors.

In the past decade, Dr. Kim has focused on animal embryo engineering, stem cell research, and organoid production. He developed techniques to efficiently produce brain organoids with structures resembling the human brain using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) or embryonic stem cells. He established high-speed, large-scale production methods for brain and liver organoids. In brain organoid research, Dr. Kim developed techniques to produce brain organoids with dopamine neuron distribution, electrophysiological activity, and neuromelanin generation similar to the human brain, reducing production time from six months to 30 days. These organoids can simulate brain development and are used to study neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Additionally, brain organoids show great potential in drug screening and personalized medicine by simulating patient responses to drugs, thus accelerating new drug development.

In liver organoid research, Dr. Kim successfully cultivated organoids with liver structures and functions using stem cell technology. By optimizing the concentration and timing of differentiation signals at each stage, these liver organoids can stably expand without losing their liver functions. When treated with known hepatotoxic drugs, liver organoids demonstrated higher sensitivity to drug-induced liver toxicity compared to two-dimensional hepatocytes differentiated from pluripotent stem cells, making them suitable for in vitro toxicity screening of candidate drugs.

Dr. Kim was honored as Korea's Best Scientist in 2016 and 2017 and received the Grand Prize at the Korea New Knowledge Management Conference in 2019. In 2022, he was awarded the highest education award by the Ministry of Education in Korea. In China, he received the Jilin Province Outstanding Foreign Scientist Award in 2018 and the Guangdong Province Friendship Award in 2022.