Ming Wai Lau Centre for Reparative Medicine

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Gonçalo Castelo-Branco the Göran Gustafsson Prize 2021. Gonçalo has been awarded the prize in Medicine for his research of oligodendrocytes, a type of brain cell, and the myelination of neurons in health and disease.

mRNA technology is now being used in developing vaccine against coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Linxian Li has worked on the development of a delivery system for mRNA molecules into our cells for ten years, hoping that producing better lipid nanoparticles will bring less side effects and longer storage time in vaccine, and even gene therapy. Let’s learn more about the mRNA technology.

Liquid biopsy is becoming an important alternative to the traditional tissue-based cancer diagnosis for precision medicine. However, the increasingly reported non-canonical genetic alterations from DNA-based sequencing have raised questions on their underlying mechanisms and clinical significances. Zongli Zheng comments in an editorial in the prestigious Journal of Thoracic Oncology and calls for precision diagnosis to maximize patient benefits.

Sijie Chen is one of the co-investigators together with Prof Ben Zhong Tang, our MWLC associate member, who is the main applicant for the application titled “New Aggregation-Induced Emission Systems: Solving the Existing Problems in Bioimaging and Developing New Biological Applications”. The application has been awarded HKD 6,400,000 from Research Grants Council (RGC) under the Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) Scheme (2020/21). The team comprises eight faculty members from five institutes with complementary expertise in organic chemistry, photochemistry, biology, and medicine. They aim to develop new AIEgens with emission in the second near-infrared window, persistent room-temperature phosphorescence and chemiluminescence. These molecules are anticipated to solve the existing problems in bioimaging.

Stem cell research is fundamental for reparative medicine, which with the help of the body's cells, recreates and heals important organs. Now, Fredrik Lanner’s team, together with researchers at SickKids in Canada and KU Leuven in Belgium, have developed a method for defining the most general type of stem cells, that can develop into all cell types in the body. The study of totipotent stem cells in mice has been published in Nature Cell Biology.