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Professor Peiyong JIANG, a bioinformatician and Assistant Professor from the Department of Chemical Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CU Medicine), has been elected a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), in recognition of his inventive work in producing technologies that have the potential to make a real impact on the welfare of society. Professor JIANG is the first scholar from a Hong Kong institution to receive this senior membership.

Professor Jiang felt most honoured to be elected a senior member of NAI. He said, “This honour from NAI, an internationally renowned academic organisation, is a prestigious recognition and encouragement to me and my team. It is most rewarding as a biomedical scientist to successfully translate our research findings into inventions that can benefit patients with various illnesses or health issues and improve their quality of life. We hope that biotechnology will become a pillar of science and economic development for Hong Kong.”

With a multidisciplinary background in genomics, bioinformatics, computational biology and statistics, Professor JIANG has a long-standing research interest in next generation sequencing-based bioinformatics data analysis as well as its clinical applications such as non-invasive prenatal testing and cancer detection.

In addition to his academic excellence, Professor JIANG has demonstrated remarkable success in innovation, turning ideas into clinical realities that support physicians and their patients. He is a co-inventor in more than 60 granted patents, including a new class of prenatal and cancer diagnostic markers that are based on DNA methylation. DNA methylation refers to a type of biochemical change of DNA that allows one to trace the origin of a DNA molecule. In prenatal diagnostic testing, such tracing would help one identify if a DNA molecule is coming from the fetus or the mother. DNA methylation is altered or disrupted and therefore methylation patterns provide hints to the presence of a tumour. Taking advantage of the methylation patterns of plasma DNA, Professor JIANG’s team has developed a novel bioinformatics platform for non-invasive screening of multiple types of cancer, e.g. liver cancer and nasopharyngeal cancer.

About the National Academy of Inventors

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) is a member organisation comprising U.S. and international universities, and governmental and non-profit research institutes, with over 4,000 individual inventor members and Fellows spanning more than 250 institutions worldwide. Professor Rocky S. Tuan, Vice-Chancellor and President of CUHK, is a Fellow of NAI, elected in 2017.

NAI was founded in 2010 to recognise and encourage inventors with patents issued from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, encourage the disclosure of intellectual property, educate and mentor innovative students, and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society.

NAI has named 61 academic inventors to the 2021 class of NAI Senior Members. These members are active faculty, scientists and administrators who have demonstrated remarkable innovation, producing technologies that have made, or aspire to make, a real impact on the welfare of society. They also have growing success in patents, licensing and commercialisation.