Hanoi (VNA)𝐆 – With excellent achievements in scientific research, Dr Truong Thanh Tung has been selected as one of the 10 outstanding young faces of 2022 honoured by the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union’s Central Committee.

Tung currently leads a new drug research group of the Phenikaa Institute for Advanced Study and is a lecturer at the Phenikaa University’s Faculty of Pharmacy. The Vietnam Outstanding Young Faces Award will be presented to the awardees at a ceremony on March 26. The award is given to individuals under 35 years old who have shown excellent performance in their study and work in various fields including scientific research, sports, arts, production, community work, and national defence. When he was still a high school student, Tung was fascinated by creating new substances from chemical reactions. He decided to follow his dream to become a pharmacist and invent new drugs to save patients. “Studying medicine can save people on a case-by-case basis, and if successful, can save many people at the same time, so I choose to study pharmacy at the Hanoi University of Pharmacy,” he said. Since Tung was a student there, he had a research paper published on an international journal which helped him to believe in himself and encouraged him to pursue researching orientation. After graduating from the Hanoi University of Pharmacy, he continued his education with a master's degree from the Seoul National University in the Republic of Korea and a doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Despite receiving many offers from foreign companies and research institutes, Tung still returned to Vietnam with the desire to do something useful for the country.  Tung's current research group is working on a new HIV drug that aims to completely treat the disease in the future. Sharing about his research, Tung said that the most difficult thing in developing a new HIV drug is that biological testing cannot be conducted in Vietnam and must be carried out abroad. His research project is funded by the amfAR, the foundation for AIDS research, one of the world’s leading non-profit organisation dedicated to ending the global AIDS epidemic through innovative research. The treatment method is in the stage of clinical trial in Germany with positive results. Tung has one international invention patent and 30 scientific projects in the field of medical technology that have been published on international journals. He is in charge of a basic scientific research project, while also participating in the review for 20 journals of the publishing system like Nature, Springer Nature and Elesevier.   In 2022, Tung became the first young scientist in Vietnam to be elected as an official member of Sigma Xi, the oldest and most prestigious scientific association in the world, based in the US. The same year, from 2,000 global profiles in the first round and 130 in the second round, Tung was elected as one of 28 outstanding young scientists in the world to become a member of the international advisory board for the prestigious international scientific journal ISI Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry. He has been recognised for his works with numerous awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Science and Technology in 2021 and the Outstanding Young Teacher of Hanoi in 2022./.