In this Hong Kong name, the surname is Lo. In accordance with Hong Kong custom, the Western-style name is Dennis Lo and the Chinese-style name is Lo Yuk-ming.
Lo is set to succeed Rocky Tuan as the vice-chancellor and president of CUHK on 8 January 2025, following his nomination as the sole candidate and the unanimous approval of his nomination.
After obtaining his medical degree, Lo continued to study at Oxford, first obtaining a DPhil (during which he was at Hertford College) in 1994, and then a Doctor of Medicine (DM) degree in 2001.[11] He was also a junior research fellow in natural sciences at Hertford College between 1990 and 1993, and the Wellcome Career Development Fellow in Clinical Medicine from 1993 to 1994.[3]
Lo began his research career studying polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a molecular biological technique for rapidly generating millions of copies of a desired DNA sequence. He first heard about the technique at a lecture by John Bell, now Regius Professor of Medicine, at Oxford, and asked to learn the technique from Bell.[7][8][13] Working with Kenneth Anthony Fleming, his future PhD advisor, Lo found the relatively new technique generated a lot of false positives due to contamination.[14]
Lo then wondered if fetal DNA was detectable in mother's blood. Using PCR, he detected the Y chromosome in a mother bearing a baby boy.[15] During his PhD, Lo wanted to develop his research into prenatal diagnostic test, using fetal DNA from fetal cells in the mother's blood. This, however, was stymied by a number of factors, including low concentration of fetal cells, high false positive rate and the persistence of fetal cells after giving birth.[7][8]
In 1997, again using the Y chromosome as a marker in mothers bearing baby boys, Lo reported the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in most of the test subjects.[18] This was after he read that circulating tumor DNA were detectable in cancer patients' blood plasma and switched strategy to search for cell-free fetal DNA in mother's blood.[7]
Lo, who by the time was married, returned to Hong Kong the same year with his wife, as the city was preparing its handing back to China. He became a senior lecturer in the Department of Chemical Pathology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in January 1997.[8] In an interview years later, he called this discovery was like "finding your car's engine somewhere other than under the bonnet."[19]
One of the first disorders for which Lo developed non-invasive prenatal testing using cell-free fetal DNA was Rh disease, a type of anaemia that occurs when the foetus is Rh-positive but the mother is Rh-negative.[20] Separately, Lo also detected fetal RNA in mother's blood, which indicated what genes were expressed.[21] He then sought novel methods to isolate fetal DNA from mother's blood, which in 2002 came in the form of difference in DNA methylation between the mother and foetus.[22]
Lo's research into non-invasive prenatal testing was interrupted in 2003 by the SARS outbreak. An infected patient was treated at the Prince of Wales Hospital, the teaching hospital for CUHK Faculty of Medicine, turning the hospital into one of the epicenters in Hong Kong.[23][24] His group was one of the first to sequence the SARS virus[25] and to discover the existence of multiple viralstrains.[26]
Lo returned to studying detection of cell-free fetal DNA after the SARS outbreak. In 2008, he reported the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS), which has a much higher throughput than traditional PCR and was a relatively new technology at the time.[27] When used to detect Down syndrome, which is caused by an extra chromosome 21, this method was later shown to have a 100% sensitivity and a nearly 98% specificity,[28] prompting its introduction into clinics in 2011.[7]
The next year, while watching a Harry Potter movie in 3D, the flying "H" reminded him of 2 homologous chromosomes and gave him an idea on how to sequence the fetal genome: to separately sequence the 2 halves of DNA that the foetus inherited from the father and the mother.[13] For the father's half, they searched for DNA sequences present only in the father but not the mother; for the mother's half, they counted the DNA sequences from the mother to deduce the sequences inherited by the foetus, which would be found in excess in the mother's blood plasma. This discovery created a non-invasive method to detect fetal mutations.[29] In 2013, his group showed that the fetal epigenome could also be determined from mother's blood plasma.[30]
Apart from non-invasive prenatal testing, Lo started investigating cancer diagnosis, profiling and prognosis from circulating tumor DNA using NGS in 2012, when he reported the genetic profiling of cancer in patients' blood plasma.[31]
Lo is the co-founder of 2 biotechnology companies, both established in 2014. Using funding from the venture capital firm Decheng Capital, he co-founded Cirina with his longtime CUHK collaborators Rossa Chiu and Allen Chan.[33] The company focuses on cancer detection with circulating tumor DNA.[34] The company was acquired by GRAIL in 2017,[35] which, in turn, was acquired by Illumina in 2021.[36] The 3 of them also co-founded Xcelom, which commercialised their research in non-invasive prenatal testing.[33][37][38]
On 22 September 2024, Lo was nominated a candidate to succeed Rocky Tuan as CUHK president and vice-chancellor and was the sole candidate.[44] His nomination was approved unanimously on 27 September 2024 and will assume office on 8 January 2025.[45]
Lo is married to Alice Siu Ling Wong. They met each other while Lo was pursuing his DPhil at the University of Oxford, where Wong was completing her DPhil in semiconductorphysics.[4] They got married in 1994.[60]
^ abcdAbboud, Alexis (4 November 2014). "Dennis Lo (1963- )". Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 8 September 2021. Retrieved 8 September 2021.
^ ab"Dennis Lo". CUHK Faculty of Medicine. Archived from the original on 10 September 2021. Retrieved 10 September 2021.
^"Dennis Lo". Croucher Foundation. Archived from the original on 6 October 2021. Retrieved 5 October 2021.
^"Professor Dennis Lo". Centre for Personalised Medicine, University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 6 October 2021. Retrieved 5 October 2021.
^Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Expert Committee (2 October 2003). "The SARS Epidemic: The Prince of Wales Hospital Outbreak". SARS in Hong Kong: from Experience to Action(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on 13 April 2021. Retrieved 10 October 2021.
^"好奇心泛起了漣漪——專訪盧煜明". U-Beat Magazine (in Chinese). Chinese University of Hong Kong. 19 December 2016. Archived from the original on 11 September 2021. Retrieved 11 September 2021.