Dennis Lo
| Dennis Lo | |||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 盧煜明 | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 卢煜明 | ||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Lú Yùmíng |
| IPA | [lǔ ŷmǐŋ] |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Jyutping | Lou4 Juk1-ming4 |
Dennis Yuk-ming Lo (born c. 1963) is a professor of chemical pathology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences. Lo is a fellow of the Royal Society.
Lo was born in Hong Kong. His father was a medical doctor and his mother taught music. In 1983, at the age of 20, he attended Cambridge University and completed a pre-clinical degree before attending Oxford for clinical training. He later finished his PhD at Oxford. Lo has stated that he does not practice a religion but in his heart of hearts would have "to invoke something religious to explain everything right to the beginning."
After learning about a new method to detect small amounts of DNA called polymerase chain reaction from another researcher, Lo read a research paper describing the detection of tumor DNA in blood plasma. Lo wondered if it would be possible to detect fetal DNA in blood from a pregnant mother. In 1989, he published results that suggested fetal DNA did exist but only in low quantities. However, in 1997, Lo was successful in detecting fetal DNA in the plasma of a pregnant mother by using the male chromosome as a marker. He called the discovery like "finding your car's engine somewhere other than under the bonnet." This discovery has enabled a safer way for prenatal diagnosis of abnormalities in fetal development. In 2011, he developed a sequencing-based technology to determine the gender of the fetus earlier than an ultrasound. Lo was able to adapt this technology to use RNA, instead of DNA, to detect down-syndrome in unborn fetuses where previous methods could cause a miscarriage.
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