Bulletin No. 1, 2023

Professor Dennis Lo Professor Allen Chan Empathy opens the door to innovation. Previously, expectant mothers needed to make a stressful decision to have an invasive test to detect Down syndrome, one that involves a risk of miscarriage. From the time when Dennis Lo Yuk-ming was a medical student at Oxford University, he has been looking for a non-invasive method that doesn’t hurt the foetus. The quest hasn’t been easy for him. He was frustrated to find very few foetal cells in maternal blood. “Scientists at that time generally assumed that DNA belonged within a cell. It was when I shifted my focus to cell-free DNA fragments that I discovered presence of foetal DNA in maternal plasma in 1997,” says Professor Lo, associate dean (research) of CUHK’s Faculty of Medicine, who’s often referred to as the “father of Non-invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT)”. In 2011, the discovery was translated into a non- invasive clinical prenatal test, subsequently marketed under the brand name safeT21, for foetal chromosomal aneuploidies. It has revolutionised clinical practice Envisioning a healthier future 23