News & Stories

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) celebrates the opening of the HKUST Shanghai Center today at the Shanghai AI Tower in the West Bund of the Xuhui District in collaboration with the District’s Government, and the Caohejing Hi-Tech Park Development Corporation. Leveraging its strengths in chips, artificial intelligence and biomedicine, the Center is set to enhance collaboration on innovation and entrepreneurship between Hong Kong and Shanghai.

An international research team led by HKUST has identified a blood protein that plays a key role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease.

A novel brain-wide genome-editing technology offers immense potential to be translated as a novel long-acting therapeutic treatment for Alzheimer’s patients.

A research team led by HKUST's VPRD Prof. Nancy IP has developed a simple yet highly effective Alzheimer’s blood test from Chinese patient data for the first time.

HKUST researchers have uncovered a new gene mutation responsible for a brain vascular disorder which inflicted about 10~30 million people in the world.

Seeing how Alzheimer’s disease has turned her beloved aunt from a sprightly 75-year-old to a confusing mind, Dr. Fanny IP Chui-Fun says the experience is frustrating for her as a neuroscientist because the disease remains incurable. The team spent over two years to identify the best source of each herbal ingredient for the quality is easily affected by environmental and weather conditions. “My aunt was a secondary teacher who had a sharp mind. She used to help me with my homework, but now she can’t remember things and always says something that makes little sense,” says Dr. Ip.

A research team co-led by a scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has developed a method to study how HIV mutates to escape the immune system in multiple patients, which could inform HIV vaccine design. HIV, which can lead to AIDS, evolves rapidly and attacks the body’s immune system. Genetic mutations in the virus enable it to evade immune responses mounted by T cells and antibodies, which makes it all the more difficult to design an effective solution. While there is no effective cure for the virus currently available, it can be controlled with medication. Now, the international research team has devised a new method from conventional statistical physics to reveal patterns of selection in HIV evolution using 14 patient data sets, providing a means to efficiently distinguishing the mutations that help the virus escape the immune system from those that are only random variations.

Researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) discovered a novel molecular mechanism that controls the delivery of a key protein in planar cell polarity (PCP) – an important process in our body that regulates cell growth and cell movement, providing useful guidance on the development of new drugs for cancer treatment.    PCP is a biological process critical for tissue development and organ function. Defects in PCP could lead to illnesses such as neurological disorder, skeletal abnormalities or congenital heart disease. Even worse, cancer cells can hijack PCP to promote their own growth and expansion.