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“It was kind of miraculous,” she recalls. “You give people back the good bacteria they have lost over time, and you give people the chance of overcoming the symptoms.” Every year, some patients in Hong Kong suffer through the same condition. Hopes are high that the Hospital Authority will approve the CUHK faecal-transplant treatment for use in the Hong Kong health system. “If successful this will be a major breakthrough,” Professor Chan says. “We can make use of our innovations to tackle a potentially deadly disease.” The MagIC team is now conducting clinical trials on the use of faecal transplants to treat obesity, Type 2 diabetes, depression and autism, with the autism studies likely to kick into high gear in mid-2023. Such transplants also appear to enhance immunotherapy and the treatment of cancer. MagIC is also developing a stool bank as well as a centralised system for donor screening, to help with the time-consuming and costly issue of matching patients with faecal donors. CUHK hosted a microbiome summit in January 2023, bringing together academics, entrepreneurs, policy makers and medical experts from around the world. The MagIC team has worked regularly with their collaborators at the Universities of Cambridge, Chicago and Melbourne, who will attend, as will participants from the the drug-development industry. That fateful meeting a half-decade ago laid a solid foundation, with the pending research at MagIC likely to yield results in the next few years. “This wave is not just a gut feeling,” Professor Ng says. “It has emerged to be true.” Transforming microbiome research into macro impact In late 2019, MagIC’s established its first spin- off biotechnology company, GenieBiome Ltd. GenieBiome is truly independent, however, with separate sources of funding; the spin-off is entirely funded by private seed and angel investors. Still, it’s a challenging process. It has not to date been much of a feature of academia in Asia to build on ideas generated at a university to create a standalone 20 Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2023