Life Sciences and Medical Breakthroughs: The Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, NIPT and the Front Lines of Two Pandemics

A discovery born in a single CUHK laboratory went on to rewrite routine obstetric practice in dozens of countries; an institute housed within a teaching hospital turned that kind of "bench-to-bedside" translation into institutional habit. This article uses the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences (LiHS) as its axis, threading together the Faculty of Medicine's most globally influential research lines: non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), cancer liquid biopsy, digestive diseases, and the two great battles against SARS and COVID-19. This is a factual archive entry for the reference section (04 Research); it carries no credibility badge, and each claim is individually sourced to academic or official material.

Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, principal inventor of NIPT and Chair Professor of Chemical Pathology at CUHK, now also serves as the University's ninth Vice-Chancellor and President; this article records his achievements as an award-winning scientist in a neutral, positive light (for the administrative context, see Overview · Vice-Chancellor transitions). "Professor Lo" below refers to Dennis Lo; names of teams, institutions and awards are recorded faithfully as given in the sources.

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# 1. How the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences Was Founded

The Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences (LiHS) at CUHK is the Faculty of Medicine's flagship translational biomedical platform. According to a CUHK Communications and Public Relations Office announcement^※, the Li Ka Shing Foundation donated HK$100 million to the Faculty of Medicine in 2005, earmarked for the establishment of a flagship institute with translational medicine as its core mission, to be housed at the Prince of Wales Hospital. Two years later, the institute was formally opened — on 7 September 2007, with Mr. Li Ka-shing himself presiding over the opening ceremony, attended by then Vice-Chancellor Professor Lawrence J. Lau and Hospital Authority Chairman Dr. William Wu Yiu-chang, among others.

On the same day, the Foundation made a further allocation of HK$20 million to endow a second "Li Ka Shing Professor" chair, with Professor Chan Hsiao-chang of the Department of Physiology as its first appointee. According to the same announcement, Mr. Li stressed in his opening address that medical research must combine "intuition with empathy, bringing courage and connection in moments of vulnerability." The institute's founding ethos was precisely to turn that humanistic concern into a systematic institutional framework for research.

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# 2. Physical Form and Core Research Directions

LiHS's main building is the Li Ka Shing Medical Sciences Building. According to the Faculty of Medicine's facilities page^※, the building has 11 storeys and a total floor area of over 14,000 square metres, located within the Prince of Wales Hospital campus. The Prince of Wales Hospital is one of Hong Kong's largest teaching hospitals, and its heavy clinical caseload gives the institute an unrivalled "bedside" interface for translational medicine — basic scientific discoveries can move rapidly into clinical validation within the same campus. The building houses a biomedical computing centre, core molecular biology facilities, core cell biology facilities, a dedicated experimental animal facility, and a translational omics platform.

According to the official LiHS page^※ and the Faculty of Medicine's institute page^※, the institute currently has over 60 principal investigators and over 450 researchers^※ (of both clinical and non-clinical backgrounds), working across two broad divisions comprising 14 research themes:

Of these, the "Asian cancers" and "molecular diagnostics" themes form the twin pillars of LiHS's global reputation and have been the focus of its most prestigious honours over the years; the "genomics and bioinformatics" arm provides the computational and data-analysis backbone for the entire institute.

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# 3. The Science of NIPT: From "Look in the Plasma" to a Global Clinical Standard

Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is the principal source of LiHS's international reputation and one of the most globally influential outputs in CUHK's research history. The CUHK chemical pathology team's answer to the question — "can fetal genetic information be read from a simple blood draw?" — spans more than two decades and can be told in four phases: discovery, the long slog, clinical adoption, and recognition.

# Discovery (1997): Fetal DNA Hides in Maternal Plasma

According to the Lasker Foundation's award citation^※ and the Faculty of Medicine's flagship research page^※, in 1997 the CUHK team discovered that cell-free fetal DNA is present in the blood plasma of pregnant women (plasma being the liquid component of blood once cells are removed). The disruptive insight lay in where they looked: previous attempts had hunted for fetal material within the cells of maternal blood (exceedingly rare and difficult to isolate), whereas this team turned to plasma, a compartment long overlooked — and there they found fetal DNA in appreciable quantities.

A shift in thinking: NIPT did not begin with a new instrument but with a conceptual pivot — from "look in the cells" to "look in the plasma." That pivot pushed "non-invasive reading of the fetal genome" from fantasy to the threshold of feasibility.

# The Long Slog (c. 1997–2008): From "DNA Exists" to "We Can Diagnose"

Establishing that fetal DNA exists was one thing; building a reliable diagnosis on it was another, and the gap between the two took years of hard technical work. According to the Lasker Foundation^※ and the related academic paper (PMC)^※: fetal DNA makes up only a small fraction of the DNA in maternal plasma — the great majority is the mother's own. Around 2002, the team further clarified the differences between maternal and fetal DNA, making it possible to identify fetal DNA in maternal blood. Over the following decade, the team settled on "massively parallel sequencing" — that is, next-generation high-throughput sequencing — as the key technical route, allowing the vast numbers of DNA fragments in maternal blood to be counted and compared one by one, and from that statistical picture, to infer whether the fetus carries specific chromosomal abnormalities (such as an extra copy of chromosome 21, i.e. Down syndrome).

# Clinical Adoption (2010s): Becoming a Global Standard of Care

According to the Lasker Foundation^※ and the CUHK Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology's NIPT service page^※, non-invasive Down syndrome screening based on cell-free DNA analysis is now used clinically in more than ninety countries and territories; according to the Faculty of Medicine's 2021 Breakthrough Prize announcement^※, it is performed more than seven million times a year. Its spread has had one global clinical consequence: a marked decline in invasive prenatal diagnostic procedures, sparing large numbers of pregnant women the risks of amniocentesis and similar tests. After LiHS was founded, it became the institutional vehicle that carried this achievement into clinical translation — from the early methodology development and the establishment of the massively parallel sequencing route, to collaborative validation with the clinical teams of the Prince of Wales Hospital, all of it taking place in this building.

# Recognition (2022): The Lasker Award

According to the Lasker Foundation^※, the 2022 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award was conferred for the invention of non-invasive prenatal testing, honouring the achievement of "discovering fetal DNA in maternal blood and using it to develop a non-invasive prenatal test for Down syndrome." The Lasker is often described as a "Nobel bellwether," and this recognition cemented NIPT's landmark place in the history of modern clinical medicine.

"I am deeply grateful to the committee for recognizing our team's effort. Without my team this could not have been achieved." — Professor Lo, in his 2021 Breakthrough Prize acceptance remarks^※

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# 4. From Prenatal to Cancer Prevention: Early Cancer Detection

The underlying logic of NIPT — capturing cell-free nucleic acids from plasma and making a non-invasive call — transfers neatly to early cancer screening. Tumours, too, shed circulating DNA bearing mutation signatures into the blood. The LiHS team has piled up several milestone results in this direction.

Plasma EBV DNA screening for nasopharyngeal cancer: Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is markedly more common in southern China and Southeast Asia, yet by the time it is conventionally detected it is usually already at an advanced stage. According to a Faculty of Medicine announcement^※ (published in NEJM Evidence, 2023; the earlier results appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017^※), the team screened over 20,000 middle-aged men (2013–2016) for plasma Epstein–Barr virus DNA, and offered a second screen to over 17,000 of them 3–5 years later. The results: of the NPC cases picked up by screening, about 70% were stage I or II; among unscreened populations, cases are mostly stage III or IV at diagnosis, with only about 20% caught early. Those who tested positive in two consecutive rounds had up to a 17-fold higher risk of developing NPC in the future than those who tested negative.

Multi-cancer early detection (MCED): In 2022, the team published a fragmentomics technique that screens for multiple cancers simultaneously by analysing the fragment characteristics of plasma DNA. Building on this technology, Professor Lo and Prenetics jointly founded the venture Insighta in June 2023^※, with financing of US$200 million — according to the announcement, one of the largest private life-sciences deals in Hong Kong's history. Insighta plans to launch Presight, targeting lung and liver cancer, in 2025, and to expand to Presight One covering more than ten cancer types by 2027. The technology originates from the Centre for Novostics under InnoHK.

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# 5. Digestive Diseases: From Helicobacter pylori to the Gut Microbiome

Digestive diseases are a traditional strength of the CUHK Faculty of Medicine and the core business of its State Key Laboratory of Digestive Disease.

Joseph Sung: H. pylori and endoscopic haemostasis. Joseph J. Y. Sung is a gastroenterologist. According to the Faculty of Medicine^※, his team was the first to prove that a one-week course of antibiotics can eradicate Helicobacter pylori infection, heal peptic ulcers and reduce recurrence; the team also pioneered the use of endoscopic treatment in place of surgery for bleeding ulcers, reducing the need for open abdominal operations. This body of work changed the treatment paradigm for ulcer disease.

Jun Yu: the gut microbiome and colorectal cancer. According to CUHK research records^※, Professor Jun Yu's team studies the role of gut microbial dysbiosis at each stage of colorectal carcinogenesis, yielding new microbiome-based clues for the diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer. Yu serves in the Institute of Digestive Disease and the State Key Laboratory of Digestive Disease.

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# 6. Two Pandemics: SARS and COVID-19

SARS, 2003. According to a paper published in The Lancet (2003)^※, the Prince of Wales Hospital documented the frontline Hong Kong experience of the SARS outbreak: by 25 March, 156 SARS patients had been admitted, nearly all traceable to a single index case. Joseph Sung, then Chairman of the Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, personally led the clinical team holding the front line. According to a Lancet interview marking the tenth anniversary (PMC)^※, 138 new infections had occurred within the hospital within roughly two weeks of the outbreak.

COVID-19. According to a CUHK announcement^※, the team found that COVID-19 patients can harbour active, persistent viral infection in the gut even without gastrointestinal symptoms, and on that basis established a stool-based virus test — more convenient and less invasive for infants and young children who struggle with nasopharyngeal swabs — and set up a testing centre for children to identify asymptomatic "silent carriers."

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# 7. State Key Laboratories, Honours and Academicianships

# State Key Laboratories Coordinated by the Institute

According to the Faculty of Medicine's institute page^※, LiHS coordinates two State Key Laboratories:

At the level of the Hong Kong SAR Government's InnoHK platform, LiHS's core directions have incubated the Centre for Novostics — a CUHK-led centre now based at the Hong Kong Science Park, focused on novel molecular diagnostics based on cell-free nucleic acids in blood. According to the Centre for Novostics website^※, its Scientific Director is none other than the Director of LiHS (the Chair Professor of Chemical Pathology), completing a chain that runs from basic research (LiHS / the State Key Laboratories) to applied translation (InnoHK). For the full list and structure of the State Key Laboratories, see State Key Laboratories.

# Top-Tier Honours

In addition, according to the Faculty of Medicine's 2021 Breakthrough Prize announcement^※, the institute's team has been named to Nature Biotechnology's list of the world's top twenty translational researchers for four consecutive years, one of the longest-running Asian teams on that list.

# Academicians and National Honours

A number of CUHK scholars have been elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and international academies. For example, according to a CUHK announcement^※, Joseph Sung was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the only Hong Kong scientist to receive the honour that year; the University's NIPT inventor (Chair Professor of Chemical Pathology) has received fellowships including FRS of the Royal Society. For the complete list of academicians and international fellows, the latest official announcements prevail.

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# 8. The Li Ka Shing Foundation's Successive Donations

The founding and growth of LiHS have depended on the Li Ka Shing Foundation's sustained financial commitment. The major publicly documented donations are as follows:

According to the 2021 announcement^※, the HK$30 million donation was earmarked to expand laboratory bench space (adding 14 bench stations with 84 working positions) and to triple the capacity of the rodent animal facility, with completion expected by end-2022. According to the 2022 donation announcement^※, the Li Ka Shing Foundation's cumulative donations to CUHK medical research now exceed HK$400 million (as of 2022); the 2022 gift of HK$150 million, together with matching funds and in-kind contributions from CUHK, forms the HK$300 million "Passion for Perfection" (P for P) programme, dedicated to moving laboratory results into clinical application — the "bench to bedside" translation.

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# 9. LiHS's Place in CUHK's Research Landscape

The Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences is no isolated outpost; it is one of the axial structures of the Faculty of Medicine's research ecosystem: it coordinates two State Key Laboratories (Digestive Disease; Translational Oncology), incubates an InnoHK centre upward (the Centre for Novostics), and connects downward to the research activities of the Faculty's clinical departments; its more than 450 researchers span internal medicine, surgery, pathology, microbiology and beyond.

Zooming out, the two highest international accolades the Faculty of Medicine has received in translational medicine — the Lasker and the Breakthrough Prize — are both directly tied to LiHS. And the institute's physical adjacency to the Prince of Wales Hospital gives it something purely basic-research institutions lack: the institutional convenience of clinical data access and translational validation. That was precisely the siting logic emphasised at the 2007 opening ceremony — "to let researchers shuttle frictionlessly between laboratory and bedside."

This museum pairs the two peaks of CUHK research: one is the optical fibre that led to the Nobel Prize in Physics, the other is the NIPT that led to the Lasker Award (see Research Achievements Overview). The pairing is more than rhetorical — the two share a telling commonality: both began with a shift in thinking rather than a stroke of luck — optical fibre from the insight that "glass pure enough can carry light over long distances," NIPT from the insight that "fetal DNA hides in plasma, not in cells."

Related reading: Research Achievements Overview, State Key Laboratories, Healthcare and Multi-Scale Robotics, Research Output and Spin-off Companies.

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