Bulletin No. 1, 2023

Go with your gut Despite that potential, the professors had to push hard before their vision was realised. “People were skeptical—nobody was interested in this idea,” Professor Chan, the dean of CUHK’s Faculty of Medicine, concedes. They persisted, however, and now their ideas have borne fruit. MaGIC—full name the Microbiota I-Center—has set foot at InnoHK, with a mission to developing novel classes of microbiome diagnostics and therapeutics. Many if not most diseases can be traced back to disruption of the microbiome. While we have limited control over which of our genes are regulated, and how genes are expressed, our microbiome can be manipulated with direct medical intervention. “All human diseases we can think of are related to some abnormality in the microbiome,” Professor Ng says. “We call the gut the second brain. Autism, depression, even Alzheimer’s and eczema are being shown to be due to changes in the microbiome.” 18