Professor Dennis Lo is the Director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, the Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine and Professor of Chemical Pathology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is also the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Medicine of CUHK. Lo received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge and the Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Oxford. Following his training at Oxford, he was appointed as the University Lecturer in Clinical Biochemistry and Honorary Consultant Chemical Pathologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, the teaching hospital of the University of Oxford Clinical School. He was also a Fellow at Green College, Oxford.
Lo returned to Hong Kong to join the Medical Faculty of CUHK in 1997. In the same year, he discovered the presence of fetal DNA in maternal plasma. His group has since then been a key pioneer in our understanding of the biology of this phenomenon and its diagnostic applications. In particular, Lo’s group has pioneered technologies for the non-invasive prenatal testing of Down syndrome, which have created a paradigm shift in prenatal medicine. He received the Future Science Prize – Life Science Prize in 2016 for his seminal contribution to the widely-used non-invasive prenatal test based on the original discovery of fetal DNA in maternal blood which has benefited millions of pregnant women globally. Lo has also demonstrated that the fetal genome, transcriptome and methylome can be sequenced from maternal plasma.
Lo is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences. He won the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine in 2014. Lo was awarded a Croucher Senior Medical Research Fellowship in 2006.
10 November 2016
