The University of Hong Kong AI-based Pathogen Treatment and Prevention Project

The project is backed by the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases, the University of Hong Kong and is headed by the top research team of the University. The project will help improve early warning diagnostics foremerging infectious diseases in China and effectively safe guard public health safety and social stability. 

Team Introduction: 

The project is undertaken by the top research team ofthe University ofHong Kong. The team leader is Guan Yi, professor ofthe University of Hong Kong, joint director ofWHO Reference Laboratory for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza and academician oftheBritish Royal College of Medicine Public Health Center. 

He has published over320 peer-reviewed articles with40,000 citations and more than30 patents.The project team consists of33 members working atthe State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases,the University of Hong Kong. Among them,27havedoctoral degrees and many of them have wonspecialhonorsat the National Awards for Science and Technology Advancement.  

Project Introduction: 

Based on the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases, the University of Hong Kong and targeting the shortcomings in the diagnosis of clinical infectious diseases and treatment of viral diseases, the project will serve as a platform to assess, prevent and control existing and emerging pathogens, and to carry out the genomic sequencing of pathogens, and assessment and accuracy of treatment. Through high throughput sequencing, it will accelerate the speed of clinical diagnosis, control the costs and solve the key problems in the prevention and control of major viral infectious diseases.

The team has engaged in research on flu andemerging infectious diseases, accumulated ahugeamount ofantigenic and hereditary virus strains and acquired a large quantity of clinical samples and blood samples of patients in recovery period.

Themembers have been involved inseveral projects in this field, includingestablishing high-level biological safety and animal infection laboratories, leading anintensive pathogen supervision network, multiple sequencing testing systems and platform operation and analysis,setting upaninstant, high throughput pathogenic full genomic sequencing platform,  asequence assembling method and platform based on evolutionary analysis andmonoclonal antibody preparation technology andascreening platform for natural biologicaland chemical drugs.

By the end of 2022, a global microbial metagenome database with comprehensive biological annotations will be established. The analysis method of sensitive pathogen identification and thedetection and prediction methods of pathogen phenotype in sequence will be developed. Metagenomics and artificial intelligence analysis will be applied to identify the microbial basis of serious human infections. The world's leading pathogenic microorganism diagnosis and new pathogen efficient artificial intelligence identification system will be launched. The therapeutic products for major viral diseases will be developed. Apart from that,the construction ofamolecular Chinese medicine standardization production base is under preparation.