CUHK Research: Changing the world

brain, which can lead to the creation of whole other classes of drugs. “We will conduct research about pathological and biological mechanisms to broaden our understanding of cellular pathways,” says Professor Ko. “I do hope the clinical trials will be successful. By translating our findings in the laboratory, we hope our research in neuroscience can make a difference to the world.” We dig deep into mechanisms about how the brain works and fails to work, and in particular deterioration and dysfunction caused by ageing. “We must go through many steps to achieve primary prevention. From pre-clinical scientific research to clinical trials, and then upscaling them before applying the outcome to society– it is a long journey,” says Professor Ko. Based on positive experimental results, the team is conducting clinical trials in humans with Professor Vincent Mok and Dr Bonaventure Ip. “Patients with cerebral small vessel disease and blood-brain barrier leakage are a few times more prone to having dementia in five to 10 years. As our data suggested a GLP-1 agonist could be useful to all ageing patients who develop problems with their brain vessels, we hope to perform clinical trials on these patients to test if the GLP-1R-targeting drugs can help slow down the progression of pathology, perhaps via reversing brain vessel ageing.” The team’s research works have been recognised by the 2021 Excellent Young Scientists Fund from the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China and the 2022 Sir David Todd Lectureship from the Hong Kong College of Physicians. Beyond clinical trials, the team also attempts to establish the mechanism of what happens in an ageing 71