【大學路多元升學展2026】生物醫學工程創新助力精準醫療

[00:00:01][music] >> Good morning, everyone. Good morning.

[00:00:10]Um first of all, thank you to the organizer for inviting me to give this talk today. I'm Alan Lee and I'm from the Department of Biomedical Engineering of CUHK. My presentation today will be in English, but I'm sure all of you have got the brochure from our department colleagues. If you want to refer to the English to the Chinese version or you want you have any questions about our program, please feel free to come to our booth.

[00:00:35]Our booth number is number one.

[00:00:38]Today, I'm going to talk about precision medicine. And I would like to first talk a little bit about myself, my educational background. I did my undergrad in mechanical engineering.

[00:00:51]And I then decided to do something that is going to be useful to everybody, to everyone of us, okay? So, I wanted to change my direction from mechanical engineering to biomedical engineering.

[00:01:06]And specifically, I worked on biomedical materials, materials that can be implanted into the human body for repairing and regenerating our diseased tissues.

[00:01:17]And I did my PhD in this area.

[00:01:20]When I was done with my PhD, I then wanted to, you know, have a better understanding of the medical need, have a better understanding of the diseases that are affecting many people, especially the elderly. And that brought me to a medical school. I did a post-doc in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and I researched on joint diseases, especially osteoarthritis.

[00:01:45]And I'm going to talk to you about how my experience in studying engineering, biomedical materials, and orthopedic surgery helped me to find innovative solutions to to diseases via precision medicine.

[00:02:02]I'm sure we all know that a lot of money is spent on drug prescription. Okay, not just in Hong Kong, but everywhere.

[00:02:10]Previously, I was not very clear about how many drugs we take and how much money is spent.

[00:02:18]Last summer, I was invited to give a talk at the University of Cambridge and I spent one day in the British Museum before I came back to Hong Kong.

[00:02:28]When I saw this piece of textile artwork, I was very surprised to learn the number um at the number of the average number of drugs prescribed to an individual in the UK and this is 14,000. That means on average a person in the UK takes more than 10,000 drugs throughout his or her lifetime. So, you can imagine this is a huge number and this is going to incur a large amount of medical cost. And my question back then was can we really in reduce the number of drugs prescribed to the patients, but achieve the same treatment outcomes and can we reduce the health care burden associated with drug prescription?

[00:03:22]When I look at this figure, this is from a publication.

[00:03:26]We can see that actually many of the drugs that we develop do not work so well. You can see that in the preclinical stage okay, this lasts 4 to 5 years. We test a lot of drugs. We use small animal models and the large animal models to see whether the drug is safe and effective. And then when we find out, okay, they really seem to be safe to the animals and they seem to be able to cure a disease in the animals. We move on to the clinical trials and this lasts usually um 4 to 5 years.

[00:04:05]And you can see that when we look at the success rates here, in clinical phase one, we have 50% of success rate, clinical phase two, 36% and clinical phase three, 59. That means we have a success rate of only 10% in the clinical trials because that's what you get when you multiply these three numbers.

[00:04:27]And this is what I want to address in my research. Can we do better in finding the right drug for patients?

[00:04:37]And the gap that I want to address, that I want to fill in my scientific research is to make sure that the drugs that appear to be effective and the safe in preclinical evaluation also work in human patients.

[00:04:56]And that brought me to the concept, brings me to the concept of precision medicine.

[00:05:02]This is also called personalized medicine and it is an approach to health care that tailors medical treatment and the prevention strategies to individual characteristics, meaning we treat patients as as different individuals and we take into consideration their differences in genetics, environment and lifestyle.

[00:05:25]How do we realize precision medicine?

[00:05:28]We can analyze the patient's DNA through genome genomic sequencing. We can analyze the biomarkers, for example, the level of certain serum markers.

[00:05:40]We can also find specific molecular targets based on the information from, for example, um, gene sequencing and then, um, suggest the most targeted treatment to the patient. And we, of course, in today's world, can leverage the power of big data and AI to match the patients with the most effective treatments.

[00:06:03]And I want to especially give you an example, um, uh, what I research on, that is organ-on-a-chip. But, um, before I move on, I would like to compare the concept of, uh, precision medicine to the conventional way of treatment. The conventional way of treatment means we prescribe the same treatment to all patients. For example, if the patient has the joint disease of osteoarthritis, we give them some pain, um, alleviating medication or some anti-inflammatory medication.

[00:06:38]This medication is expected to work for everybody with the same disease. However, as we all know, not all patients respond to the same drug.

[00:06:49]Therefore, in personalized medicine, we first carry out what we call patient stratification or patient classification. We divide the patients into different subgroups. Some patients may respond better to the anti-inflammatory treatment and some other patients may, uh, benefit more from lifestyle management, right? We need to find out such differences and recommend the most suitable treatments to them.

[00:07:16]How do we find their differences and recommend the most appropriate treatments to the patients? We can use, for example, CT scanning to, um, examine the structural changes in patients' joints and bones. We can use, uh, big data and AI to analyze the patients' disease stages.

[00:07:39]We can also use variables, various sensors to monitor the patient's health conditions such as the blood pressure, heart rate, etc. And last but not the least, we can generate mini models of the patient.

[00:07:54]Ideally, we want to use the patients to test different drugs, right? And then we find out which one is the most effective, but obviously we cannot do that because there would be risks associated with side effects of different drugs. Therefore, if we can use engineering methods to find a mimic or mini avatar of the patient, we will be able to predict the patient's response to a particular drug.

[00:08:22]That brings me to the concept of my research and this is something that I would like to introduce to you today, organ on a chip. We all know what organs are and then we all know what chips are, but what are organ on chip systems?

[00:08:38]OOCs, they are not microelectronic devices. Instead, they are mini models of human patients.

[00:08:45]For example, if we want to examine whether a certain drug for heart conditions will be effective for a patient, we can generate a heart on a chip system for a particular patient. Now, when I say a heart on a chip, this is not really something in the shape of the human heart. Instead, what you want to see is the key function of the organ. For example, here the heart muscle can beat or contract and this is the key functional feature of the human heart.

[00:09:19]Over the years, people have developed various types of organ on a chip systems including liver, heart, brain, lung, and also our bone and the joint organs.

[00:09:33]I want to give you a specific example on how organ on a chip can help us advance precision medicine. We all know that in a human lung, we have the tiny balloons which can expand when air comes in. Now, when you have fresh air coming into the tiny balloons, what happens is that the oxygen in the tiny balloons, they can diffuse via the barrier between the air sacs and the capillaries to provide oxygen, right? And this way, we can continuously supply the necessary oxygen to different bodily parts. Now, in order for us to develop a lung on a chip, we have to mimic this oxygen exchange. In addition, if we have any infection in the lung, for example, if virus particles come into this tiny balloon, the immune cells in the capillaries, they can also cross the barrier to get into the tiny air sacs and get rid of the viral particles. Therefore, a lung on a chip system as shown here can be established by generating an air channel and a blood channel. You can see the two channels are in close contact with each other, so the oxygen can diffuse from the top to the bottom, and our body immune cells can come up to the air channel to kill the bacteria.

[00:11:08]And uh this is a video to introduce this lung on a chip system. In the interest of time, what I'm going to do is I just want to show you um the >> The opposite sides of the membrane are lined by human lung and capillary blood vessel cells.

[00:11:24]>> Yeah.

[00:11:24]>> This mimics the arrangement of lung and blood vessel cells in the air sac of the lung.

[00:11:31]Application of cyclic suction inside channels makes the entire flexible sheet and cells stretch and relax rhythmically, just like our lung cells do when we breathe.

[00:11:41]In the lung-on-a-chip device, air flows over the top of the human lung cells, and a liquid medium containing human white blood cells flows below the capillary cell layer.

[00:11:50]To test how well the lung-on-a-chip device replicates the natural responses of living lungs, we introduced bacteria in >> Okay, you can see that we can introduce bacterial particles to the air channel, and then we can look at how the immune cells in the blood channel can come to the top. Also, if we have a drug, we can administer the drug in the blood, and then we can look at how the drug is going to help us get rid of the viral particles or bacterial particles.

[00:12:24]In this example, you can see that during COVID-19, the lung-on-a-chip system was used to to evaluate different types of drugs. And in this way, we can really greatly accelerate the process of developing antiviral drugs, and this helps us to tackle the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

[00:12:46]This another example is about the joint.

[00:12:48]We know that in Hong Kong, we are increasingly facing the health care burden of the aging society, and many patients when they age, they have the joint disease of osteoarthritis. Now, how do we find solutions or effective drugs to treat osteoarthritis? Here, this is a study by my group. We can see that the joint disease are characterized by degeneration or pathological changes in different joint tissues. We can generate a joint-on-a-chip system to incorporate all the different joint tissue components. We can then compare how the disease model established in our journal on the chip system um compared to the human patients and also animal studies. From the heat map here, you can see that obviously our journal on the chip model can better mimic the human patients characteristics.

[00:13:45]Therefore, with organ on the chip system, we can address many of the challenges associated with the conventional way of drug development that is from cell culture to animal model then to human patients.

[00:13:59]When we have organ on the chip system, we can use them as the as the representative or the mimic, the avatar of human patients. And this enables us to develop patient-specific medicine. And this is the concept of precision medicine.

[00:14:16]Furthermore, if we have patient-specific cells to generate the organ on the chip systems, what we can do is we can generate individualized heart, liver, lung, and kidney. All these organs can then be connected to generate a body on the chip or patient on the chip system.

[00:14:34]So, the key take takeaways from my presentation today is that innovations in biomedical engineering are really advancing precision medicine for improved patient outcomes. And uh we can use various technologies to address the limitations in drug development in today's world. And together, we as biomedical engineers can then engineer a healthier future for Hong Kong and also the wider world. At CUHK, our BME program is highly interdisciplinary. We emphasize a lot the um synergy between biology, medicine, and uh engineering.

[00:15:11]We encourage our students to always explore for new treatments, more efficacious therapeutics. And we realize this by continuous innovation.

[00:15:21]And the outcome or the goal of our research is to improve patient health care. And I'm also proud to tell all of you, uh, which may already be known to many of you, CUHK BME has been consistently ranked number one in Hong Kong since 2021. So, we are, uh, really, um, leading biomedical engineering innovation, especially in precision medicine. Our courses will be taught not only by professors from the Faculty of Engineering, but also many of the lectures are given by professors from Faculty of Medicine, as well as Faculty of Science. So, you will really receive a broad perspectives of health care innovation. And also, we emphasize a lot of hands-on training. Our students go to CUHK Medical Centre and also Prince of Wales Hospital to talk to the doctors, learn how to operate medical equipment, and also bring back perspectives on patient needs and un- unaddressed medical issues. If you want to know more about our program, our JUPAS admission requirement, as well as other related information, please scan the QR codes here. And also, our booth number is number one. Our colleagues and the students, we have many, uh, undergrad students here today. They will be very happy to talk to you more about our program and, um, your career prospect in biomedical engineering. With this, thank you so much for your time, and I'm happy to take any questions you may have.