Professor Dennis Lo Receives the Lasker Award, America's Top Biomedical Science Prize

Prof. Dennis Lo, Faculty of Medicine of CUHK and College Member, received the 2022 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. The Lasker Awards, created more than 75 years ago, are widely regarded as America’s top biomedical research prize. Prof. Lo was honoured for his revolutionary contribution to medical science by discovering cell-free fetal DNA in maternal blood and developed non-invasive prenatal testing for Down syndrome, laying an important cornerstone for the development of molecular diagnostics.

Prof. Lo remarked, “I am very honoured to receive this prestigious award and would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the Lasker Foundation. I am most grateful to all my mentors who have given me enlightenment, inspiration, guidance and opportunities along the way. With the support of my devoted team who have been working closely with me in the past 25 years, we successfully made prenatal investigation safer and more accurate through the development of non-invasive prenatal testing. This clinical breakthrough has helped millions of pregnant women around the world.”

Known as the “Father of Non-invasive Prenatal Testing”, Prof. Dennis Lo is the Director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, Associate Dean (Research) and Chairman of the Department of Chemical Pathology of CU Medicine. In recognition of his work, he has received numerous international honours and awards. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011 and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013. He received the 2014 King Faisal International Prize for Medicine and became the first Chinese scientist honoured with the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Award in 2015.

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(Source and photo credit: Communications and Public Relations Office, CUHK)