Dr. WONG Siu Lun Alan’s groundbreaking gene editing tool screening platform has overcome the current limitations of one-by-one testing, enabling rapid identification of the most suitable and effective gene therapy tools and accelerating development of next-generation precision genome editors. Other screening platforms that he developed facilitates the interpretation of biological system complexity, leading to efficient screening of combination therapies for clinical applications.
WONG Siu-lun Alan is an Associate Professor at the School of Biomedical Sciences of The University of Hong Kong, and the Principal Investigator and Research Project Leader in Functional Genomics at the Centre for Oncology and Immunology Limited, InnoHK. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2005 and 2007 respectively, and completed his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2011. He joined the Synthetic Biology Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012-2016 for postdoctoral training and worked at The University of Hong Kong afterwards. Dr. WONG’s research takes an integrative approach leveraging on techniques in synthetic biology, CRISPR-based genome engineering, combinatorial genetics, and high-throughput functional genomics to decode the complex genetics of human diseases, as well as engineer gene editing and cellular tools for providing new biomedical and biotechnological solutions.
Biological systems are fundamentally complex. Crosstalk, redundancy, and feedback mechanisms being built in, and the combined effect of multiple changes to the systems is not simply the sum of their individual effects. Innovative tools that accelerate direct measurement of the combined effect of the changes will revolutionize the way to study and engineer the intricate biological systems in a systematic way and facilitate the development of next-generation therapeutics. Dr. WONG’s technology has transformed the way to experiment on the complex biological systems from a complicated mission requiring years of efforts by using a brute-force one-by-one testing approach into a task that a postgraduate trainee can handle in matter of months or even weeks by using this technology. His technology platforms are designed in a simple way that can be easily and broadly implemented in many laboratories worldwide to enable high-throughput discovery of combination therapy regimens for various complex diseases as well as massively parallel engineering of proteins relevant to a multitude of biomedical, therapeutic, and biotechnology applications.