Latest news with #DennisLoYuk-ming
South China Morning Post
28-04-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
‘Funding cuts won't hurt Chinese University of Hong Kong's innovation push'
Government funding cuts will not compromise the efforts of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in pursuing world-leading technological innovations, hire talent and boost student learning experiences, the institution's president has said. Advertisement But leading molecular geneticist Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming also said in a wide-ranging interview that non-urgent projects could be delayed, as the reduction in funds would pose challenges for the university. In its latest annual budget, the government slashed funding for public universities for the next three years, amounting to HK$2.8 billion (US$360 million) and resulting in an average reduction rate of 4 per cent for each of the tertiary education institutions. Authorities also said universities would need to dip into their reserves to pay back a combined HK$4 billion. Earlier this month, the government said CUHK would need to pay the government HK$1 billion – the highest amount among the city's eight publicly funded universities. Advertisement Lo, who became the ninth president of CUHK in January, said the university understood the government was under financial pressure and that the institution was prepared to face such difficult times alongside authorities.
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
AI-driven blood analysis may spur cancer detection, Hong Kong prenatal test pioneer says
Affordable cancer screening may be available to Hong Kong residents within three years, as advances in artificial intelligence (AI) make the early detection of malignant tumours easier and faster, according to the creator of a pioneering prenatal test for Down syndrome. AI helps researchers recognise patterns in the gene fragments they find in blood plasma, sparking a revolution in the field of epigenetics, or the study of non-mutation behavioural effects on genes, said Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming. The AI-powered method enables researchers to decipher epigenetic signals from DNA samples without the damaging effects of the chemical treatment that destroys 90 per cent of the genetic material, he said. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. "My team members and I were asking: is it possible to use some of the AI methods developed for facial recognition [to help us] see things we cannot see?" Lo said during a January 7 interview with the Post. "As it turned out, it is." Professor Allen Chan Kwan-chee (left) and Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming (right) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong on 10 August 2017. Photo: Dickson Lee alt=Professor Allen Chan Kwan-chee (left) and Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming (right) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong on 10 August 2017. Photo: Dickson Lee> Lo's team at the Centre for Novostics at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park developed an in-house AI system based on the Convolutional Neural Network, a deep learning model that was designed mainly for image recognition. With advances in generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, the company also incorporated the transformer neural network architecture into the system, he said. Like many biomedical companies at the forefront of drug discovery, diagnostics and treatment, Novostics is diving into the use of AI. Like many companies in Hong Kong and mainland China, the company "has faced challenges" in accessing computing power because of US curbs on access to cutting-edge AI chips. Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming with a chip that could sequence up to 8 million single DNA molecules for genomic research and genetic disease detection, at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Shatin on 20 October 2020. Photo: K. Y. Cheng alt=Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming with a chip that could sequence up to 8 million single DNA molecules for genomic research and genetic disease detection, at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Shatin on 20 October 2020. Photo: K. Y. Cheng> "Fortunately, we still have a pretty good system that we developed over the years", said Lo, a day before he formally took over as president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). "With the difficulty in getting the latest generation of Nvidia chips, we just have to try other chipmakers that can still provide what we need." Lo's team is developing tests for the early detection of cancers, using a similar method as his pioneering work on using the blood plasma of pregnant women to check for Down syndrome and other genetic disorders. Nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC), a throat tumour that is common in southern China's Guangdong province, was the first on Lo's target list. Using the cancer's suspected link with the Epstein-Barr virus, Lo developed a test in 2013 for finding it in blood plasma. Single-use DNA cells for genome sequencing, at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Shatin on 20 October 2020 . Photo: K. Y. Cheng alt=Single-use DNA cells for genome sequencing, at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Shatin on 20 October 2020 . Photo: K. Y. Cheng> After collecting 20,000 samples over four years, the study concluded in July 2023 that screening for the virus was an effective detection tool for the cancer, helping to slash the mortality rate to a mere 3.7 per cent from 40 per cent, according to Lo. The test is now available in Hong Kong for HK$1,500 (US$192.5). "Even though Hong Kong's healthcare system is pretty good, 75 per cent of nasopharyngeal cancer was detected late" before the new test was introduced, Lo said. The use of AI widened the possibilities of finding other cancers even if a virus may not be behind every cancer, because the discovery of each mutation was "like hunting one thing out of a million", he said. Cirina, which Lo founded in Hong Kong after creating the NPC test, merged in 2017 with Grail, a company in California that speciliased in cancer detection. The merged company developed the Galleri test to screen for more than 50 types of virus-related cancers, a product that was named as one of The Best Inventions of 2022 by Time magazine. Grail was bought for US$8 billion in 2021 by the biotechnology giant Illumina, based in San Diego. Its multi-cancer test is only available in the US market for US$949 (HK$7,380), and is not covered by most healthcare coverage plans. Lo's team is trying to make a cheaper version of the test for mainland China and the rest of the world. Novostics has developed a test called Fragma, which can find the DNA fragments of lung cancer cells and liver carcinoma in blood plasma and urine. In 2023, Lo established a US$200 million venture called Insighta with Nasdaq-listed Prenetics Group to commercialise the Fragma tests. Tencent Holdings invested US$30 million last October in Insighta, valuing the start-up at US$200 million. Insighta, based at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, is conducting large-scale clinical tests of the Fragma process in Hong Kong and mainland China. It aims to eventually offer the test at US$200 (HK$1,565). Some of the earlier products, such as the test for liver cancer, will "hopefully" be available "in two or three years from now", Lo said. "If we want to do it in a more resource-challenged environment, we need the technology to be cheaper." This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Dennis Lo bets on blood to bare all, with tests that saved 10 million mums from the needle
In the first instalment of a series to mark the 10th anniversary of the Future Science Prize, Holly Chik and Shen Xinmei look at Professor Dennis Lo's groundbreaking discovery of fetal DNA in maternal plasma, which earned him the inaugural award in the Life Sciences category in 2016. The blood tests of the future can reveal a lot more about a person's health, from neurodegenerative conditions to age-related diseases, said the Hong Kong clinical pathologist whose pioneering work in 1995 spared 10 million expecting mothers worldwide from the amniocentesis needle. "In neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, I [can] use circular nucleic acids to diagnose those conditions", said Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming during an interview last month with the Post. "Ageing changes the formatting of DNA, so [one] can use epigenetics as a clock of the DNA." Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-Ming in his laboratory at the Centre for Novstics at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park on 21 June 2023. Photo: Yik Yeung-man The T21 test, available for between HK$4,500 (US$578) and HK$8,000 at various hospitals and clinics in Hong Kong, has been rolled out to women in 90 countries since 2011. For his work, Lo received the inaugural Future Science Prize for life science in 2016, and was named the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate the same year, considered an index of the most promising Nobel Prize winners. Six years later, he received the Laskey-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, a top US biomedical research prize. The Chinese University of Hong Kong's president, Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, with the painting that inspired his discovery of genetic markers in human blood, at his office in the Hong Kong Science & Technology Park on 7 January 2025. Photo: Jonathan Wong. Inspired by a painting that depicted railway signals, Lo made more discoveries of what he called markers through the genetic material in the human blood, including circular nucleic acids, or molecules that carry genetic information in closed-loop structures. The discovery widened the possible applications, including a blood test to identify areas of the brain that are contributing to neurological issues. That would save the person from undergoing an MRI scan, saving time and money, he said. Blood tests in epigenetics, or the study of chemical reactions that influence the way genes work, can also be used to measure ageing in human organs, he said. "Is one or more of the organs ageing faster than others?" he said. "If that is the case, can we do something to slow that down?" Extracting DNA from a woman's amniotic fluid for genome sequencing during the "CUHK Pioneers Whole Genome Sequencing for Prenatal Diagnosis in Hong Kong" at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sha Tin on 17 September 2019. Photo: David Wong. "Breakthroughs usually come up if you can see the hidden link between apparently unrelated subjects", Lo said in looking back at his career. "In my story, it was pregnancy, linked to transplant and to cancer." As a medical student at The University of Oxford in the late 1980s, Lo aspired to develop a new technique to replace amniocentesis, an invasive and risky procedure of inserting a needle into the uterus to obtain fetal DNA. He thought long and hard about the "possibility that the fetus might release cells into the mother's bloodstream, but that thinking at the time was not [in the] mainstream because we knew that the fetal blood circulation system is separate from the mother's", he said. "Theoretically, what I was proposing was not very feasible." A blood test for health screenings during a health exhibition on common respiratory diseases organised by Chinese University of Hong Kong's Medical Society at Sunshine City in Ma On Shan on 5 October 2024. Photo: Edmond So He persisted, launching his research after studying about polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique for amplify DNA molecules and making millions of their copies, from the geneticist John Bell, who later served as the Chair of Medicine at Oxford. Lo sought out to find Y chromosomes, the male-determining gene, in a pregnant woman's blood. Still, the number of fetal cells that entered the maternal bloodstream was very small, not enough to be usable as a robust test. After eight years of work, Lo returned to Hong Kong in 1997 in search of a change of direction. He decided to switch his focus to blood plasma, the light-yellowish liquid that carries the platelets, the red blood cells and white blood cells. Blood plasma being prepared at a blood bank in Zhenjiang city in eastern China's Jiangsu province on August 2, 2014. Photo: Xinhua. Even then, the conventional wisdom was that DNA did not float outside cells. As he gazed into a boiling pot of instant noodles one night, Lo had his eureka moment. "I arrived at something really simple: take some plasma, boil it for five minutes and test a few drops of that boiled soup with PCR", he said, noting that DNA is robust enough to withstand heat. "Lo and behold, the signal occurred, much stronger than if you used the cells. In plasma, there are enzymes which might degrade the DNA. So if you heat that, you kill those enzymes, leaving the DNA behind." After the T21 blood test came into clinical use, Lo shifted his search to male cells in women, and organ transplants came to mind. Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming with a RNA microchip, used to detect RNA molecules located on chromosome 21, at the Postgraduate Education Centre of the Faculty of Medicine at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sha Tin on 9 January, 2007. Photo: SCMP His studies showed that Y chromosomes could be detected in the blood of women who received men's transplanted kidney or liver, a discovery that led to the development of tools for detecting transplant rejections. "If the body rejects an organ, more cells are killed, [so] when the cells die, they release the DNA into the bloodstream", he said. "If you successfully treat that, the [detected DNA] level would come down." Blood tests can also be used to detect cancer, because pregnancies and tumours are both "invasive" in essence to the host body. "A baby growing inside a mother is a little bit invasive to the placenta, just like a cancer growing in a patient", he said. While Down syndrome occurs because of an extra copy of the 21st chromosome pair, gene amplification is common in cancer cells, where certain genes that are advantageous to the growth of cancer produce more copies. These genes are detectable in a similar way to chromosome 21. (Left to Right) Allen Chan Kwan-chee, Professor of Chemical Pathology at CU Medicine; Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-Ming, Director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK); and Dr. Jacky Lam Wai-kei, Assistant Dean (Research), Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Pathology at CU Medicine, during a press conference on a CUHK study about the early detection of nasopharyngeal cancer on 11 July 2023. Photo: May Tse Lo and his team developed a blood test for detecting cancers, starting with nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a type of cancer in the throat from the back of the nose to the back of the mouth, which is more prevalent in southern China than Western countries. The future does not end there. The blood-brain barrier, the semi-permeable membrane between the blood and the interstitium of the brain, holds great potential for exploration. Future blood tests could incorporate DNA reading into their current roles of evaluating organ function and helping diagnose diseases, Lo said. "In the future, a blood test would also involve this type of technology", he said. "Apart from our usual liver function tests, they may also read out DNA signs." "Blood plasma carries DNA released by different parts of a body. We can decipher the mixture back into their various sources", he said. "If there are injuries to organs, the representation from that part [of the body] would increase," making it possible to decipher the histories of strokes or heart attacks from blood, he said. Asked about the global health impact he would like his research to have, Lo said "our goal is to maintain our health for as long as possible and to make it accessible to as many people as we can." This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
South China Morning Post
06-02-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
CUHK head says bulk of school reserves tied up as Hong Kong plans funding cuts
Most of the Chinese University of Hong Kong's reserves have specific purposes and cannot be redirected arbitrarily, the varsity's president has said, adding that he hopes possible government funding cuts will not affect the institution's new initiatives. Advertisement Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming acknowledged on Thursday the city's financial challenges, saying CUHK was willing to go through tough times with society. But Lo also highlighted that any cuts should not undermine Hong Kong's competitiveness as an international education hub. The top molecular geneticist took office as the ninth president of the university on January 8 and met the press on Thursday. His tenure begins as the government grapples with a huge deficit of nearly HK$100 billion (US$12.8 billion) in the current financial year, with public universities expected to bear the brunt of funding cuts. Advertisement 'The global competition in the education sector will wait for no one. We will regress if we do not make progress … All new plans need resources. I hope all funding adjustments for universities will not affect those new plans,' he said.
