Dennis Lo

Professor Dennis Lo is a scientist recognized worldwide for his contribution to the development of non-invasive prenatal tests by discovering free fetal DNA in maternal blood. The importance of his discovery goes beyond the prenatal scope, since free DNA is a non-invasive biomarker to detect other diseases, such as cancer.

Professor Dennis Lo is the Director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, the Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine, and Professor of a Chemical Pathology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is also the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Medicine of CUHK. Dennis Lo received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge and the Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Oxford.

Following his training at Oxford, he was appointed as the University Lecturer in Clinical Biochemistry and Honorary Consultant Chemical Pathologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, the teaching hospital of the University of Oxford Clinical School. He was also a Fellow at Green College, Oxford.

Dennis Lo returned to Hong Kong in 1997. In the same year, he discovered the presence of fetal DNA in maternal plasma. His group has since remained at the forefront of this field. His group was the first to report the presence of cell-free fetal RNA and fetal epigenetic markers in maternal plasma and pioneered the use of such markers for non-invasive prenatal diagnosis. Dennis Lo was also the first to show that cell-free fetal nucleic acids in maternal plasma could be used for the non-invasive prenatal diagnosis of fetal trisomy 21 and had devised multiple solutions for this hitherto difficult diagnostic problem, including methods based on plasma RNA-SNP allelic ratios, plasma epigenetic markers, digital PCR and massively parallel DNA sequencing. With the use of massively parallel sequencing and the development of novel bioinformatics strategies, Dennis Lo’s group succeeded at deciphering a genome-wide genetic map of the fetus through the analysis of the small amounts of fragmented DNA floating in the blood of pregnant women. This scientific achievement lays the foundation for developing non-invasive prenatal diagnostic tests for multiple genetic diseases in a non-invasive way.

Dennis Lo has extended his work to other fields. He discovered that DNA from a transplanted solid organ could be detected in the plasma of a transplant recipient. This discovery has led to the development of non-invasive test for monitoring post-transplantation rejection. He has also done foundational work in the development of cancer liquid biopsies. Using nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC) as a model system, he demonstrated that cancer liquid biopsies could be used for the detection, monitoring and prognostication of cancer. He also demonstrated that screening of NPC in asymptomatic individuals using a plasma DNA test was feasible and resulted in a 10-fold reduction in mortality. More recently, he has demonstrated that screened individuals showing a seemingly ‘false-positive’ test result had an increased risk of future cancer on follow-up.

Dennis Lo has developed multiple approaches for generalizing cancer screening by plasma DNA analysis to multiple cancer types. He developed a genomewide DNA methylation based approach in which a single blood test could be used to detect multiple types of cancer. He has also demonstrated that such an approach could be used to localise the tissue of origin of a detected cancer. These technologies have now been commercialised through the Grail’s Galleri test.

Professor Lo has received numerous awards, including the 2014 King Faisal International Prize for Medicine and being named as a ‘Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate - Chemistry’ in 2016. Professor Lo was also selected as the winner of the inaugural Future Science Prize-Life Science Prize in 2016, a prize which was seen as China’s Nobel Prize, Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award in 2019, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2021, Royal Medal in biological sciences in 2021, and the Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 2022. He has been named the “Top 20 Translational Researchers” by Nature Biotechnology in five consecutive years.

Professor Lo was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011 and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013. He is also a Founding Member and the current President of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences.