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News

The Very Best in Translational Research

Prof. Dennis Lo and Prof. Jiang Peiyong named world’s ‘Top 20 Translational Researchers’

Prof. Dennis Lo (left) and Prof. Jiang Peiyong from the Faculty of Medicine have been named the ‘Top 20 Translational Researchers of 2019’ by Nature Biotechnology, a world-renowned scientific journal which ranked the top translational researchers in biotech based on the number of patents granted, the researcher’s top-cited patents over the past five years, and the citation scores of their publications.

Professor Lo and Professor Jiang are the only scientists from an Asian institution on the list. It is also the fourth consecutive year for Professor Lo to receive this honour.

Pioneer of Non-invasive Prenatal Testing

Known as ‘the Father of Non-invasive Prenatal Testing’, Professor Lo joined CUHK in 1997 and reported the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma in the same year. He and his colleagues have been instrumental in making non-invasive DNA-based prenatal testing a clinical reality. The non-invasive prenatal test for Down syndrome developed by the team has been widely regarded as a significant breakthrough in the global scientific community. The test has been widely adopted in over 90 countries and used by over 7 million pregnant women globally every year.

Nature Biotechnology regarded Professor Lo’s work as laying the foundation for developing non-invasive tests for cancer detection based on similar scientific principles. The works of his team has also set a framework for DNA sequencing technology for cancer detection, developing non-invasive blood test that can map out multiple types of aberrations in a cancer genome.

Professor Lo felt most honoured for being named for a fourth time. ‘It is a tremendous recognition and encouragement from Nature Biotechnology to me and my team. It is most rewarding to see our work in non-invasive screening having a global impact in prenatal care and heading in a similar direction in oncology. We hope that biotechnology will become a pillar in the technology future of Hong Kong,’ he said.

A Bioinformatics Prodigy

With a multidisciplinary background in genomics, bioinformatics, computational biology and statistics, Professor Jiang has a long standing research interest in next generation sequencing-based bioinformatics data analysis as well as its clinical applications such as non-invasive prenatal testing and cancer detection.

Nature Biotechnology highlighted his work on the development of a new class of prenatal and cancer diagnostic markers that are based on DNA methylation—by taking advantage of the methylation patterns of plasma DNA, Professor Jiang and his team have developed a novel bioinformatics platform for non-invasive screening of multiple types of cancer, including liver cancer and nasopharyngeal cancer.

Professor Jiang said, ‘I am very grateful to be selected as one of the top translational researchers by this prestigious international journal. The success of our team is dependent on the close collaboration between laboratory based research, clinical research and the emerging field of bioinformatics.’