Bulletin No. 1, 2016

News in Brief 49 Prof. Jun Yu: Croucher Senior Research Fellowship Prof. Jun Yu of the Department of Medicine and Therapeutics is director of the Research Laboratory of Institute of Digestive Disease, and associate director of the State Key Laboratory of Digestive Disease. Over the years, she has made new findings in the areas of gastrointestinal cancers. Her recent discoveries include genes that facilitate and suppress colon cancer, driver mutations for the implementation of personalized cancer therapy, the biclonal origin of colon cancer and survival associated mutation signature in colon cancer. These findings pioneer the non-invasive diagnostic biomarkers for colon cancer and open up a new class of molecular mechanisms and diagnosis for colon cancer pathogenesis. Prof. Jonathan Choi: Croucher Innovation Award Prof. Choi Chung-hang Jonathan at the Department of Electronic Engineering (Biomedical Engineering) specializes in the interactions of nanoparticles with the body across the length scales of organ, tissue, cell, and organelle. His mechanistic research will inform useful ‘design rules’ for building more potent therapeutic nanoparticles. He previously reported novel ‘bio-nano’ interactions between nanoparticles and the kidney, demonstrating that intravenously injected nanoparticles of around 75 nm in diameter can accumulate inside the kidney mesangium and enter mesangial cells at the highest amounts when compared to nanoparticles of other sizes. These data will aid the development of new delivery strategies to the kidney.