HKCTC & HKAS Seminar on R&D Projects of Medical Testing

The Hong Kong Council for Testing and Certification (HKCTC) and Hong Kong Accreditation Service co-organized a seminar entitled “R&D Projects of Medical Testing” on 6th July 2015. The seminar aimed to showcase several R&D projects on medical testing funded by the Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) about the latest technological advancement on medical testing.

It is pity that I attended the second part of the seminar and missing the following topics.
In the beginning, Mr. Kesson Lee (Secretary-General, HKCTC) gave a welcome remark.
The first speaker was Prof. Allen Chan (Department of Chemical Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, CUHK) and his presentation entitled “Liquid Biopsy: from a Test for Liver Cancer to a Generic Tumor Marker for All Cancers”.
The second speaker was Dr. Leung Ka-wing (Laboratory Manager, Laboratory of Molecular Testing, HKUST) and his topic named “The Critical Role of Hair Sampling: An Extension of The Drug Detection and Service Platform for Hair Testing”.

I arrived during the tea break and took a photo with Prof. Michael Yang.

The third speaker was Prof. Michael Yang (Head and Chair Professor, Department of Biomedical Science, CityU) and his presentation topic was “Molecular Diagnostics Kits and Microfluidics System for Detection of Infectious Pathogens and Cancer Cell Mutations”. Firstly, Prof. Yang introduced the Precision Medicine which focused on Molecular Classification and Effective Drug.

Prof. Yang explained the traditional classification of cancer mainly on organs but the molecular classification on their gene of cancer. Each cancer cell had different mutation gene. Therefore, highly effective drugs for defined patients were employed through the target-based therapeutics for different type of cancer.

Precision Medicine would use Big Data for diagnosis and its analytical platforms included Sample Processing, Data Generation and Data Processing. Then Prof. Yang briefed his researches included DNA Chips, Microfluidics and Nanomedicine in which several projects had got ITF successfully.

One of his spin off companies employed the technique named Multiplex PCR and DNA Chips for Molecular Diagnosis. The company named “Multigene” which had been Science Park Incubatee and got HOKLAS Accreditation (ISO 15189).

Then Prof. Yang introduced his Microfluidics Technology Platform included “Fabrication of Microfluidics”, “Generation of Concentration Gradient”, “Controlled Manipulation of Particles” and “On-chip Analysis of DNA/Proteins/Cells. The following diagram showed his Digital Single-Cell PCR in Microfluidics Chips. After that he mentioned the Single Cell Gene Expression Analysis and found Drug metabolism or resistant genes.
The Amplification Protocol was showed as follows:
1. Single cell isolation by microfluidic chips
2. Cell lysis
3. Inverse transcription
4. Exonuclease treatment
5. cDNA preamplication
6. 10-100 Dilution of qPCR

Finally, Prof. Yang summarized the talk included Molecular Diagnostic Kits based on PCR and DNA Chip Technology for Infectious pathogens, Viral genotyping and Tumor gene mutations; as well as, Single Cell Analysis System based on Microfluidics Technology on Sing Cell selection and isolation, mutation analysis, gene expression analysis, and circulation tumor cell identification.

Q&A Session
One of participants asked Prof. Yang about Quality and Quantity result of molecular analysis. “It depended on what purpose of the testing.” answered by Prof. Yang. He said the technique could do both. About the cost of molecular diagnostic, Prof. Yang said it had already lower (~one to several thousand HKD).

Before we left, Mr. Dominic Lam (CEO, CMATCL), Mr. Arthur SY Lam (General Manager, Business Development, CMATCL) and I took a photo with Prof. Yang.

Reference:
HKCTC - http://www.hkctc.gov.hk/en/home.html
HKCTC Seminar presentation file - http://www.hkctc.gov.hk/en/work_seminars.html#b50
HKAS - http://www.itc.gov.hk/en/quality/hkas/about.htm