Convocation Newsletter, Summer 2019

WHAT NEXT? Dr Shum’s team are working with collaborators at Princeton University and Harvard University – where Dr Shum did his undergraduate, and Master and PhD degrees, respectively. More support will be needed so that lab research can be turned it into medical instruments that can benefit the general public. “Our vision is to improve healthcare, drop by drop.” Dr Anderson Shum 岑浩璋 Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering Assistant Dean (Special Projects), Faculty of Engineering Founding Member, The Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences HKU Outstanding Young Researcher Award, 2016-17 Better Blood Tests, Drop by Drop Almost everyone has experienced getting a blood test. The nurse fills multiple test tubes from the needle in your arm, and then you wait hours or even days to find out the results. Dr Shum wondered whether there was a more efficient way to carry out this common procedure: Can the waiting time be shortened? Can a smaller amount of blood be used? Can more vital information be extracted from the same amount of blood? Dr Shum’s team have developed devices using a technique called droplet microfluidics. These small plastic chips have tiny channels, about the width of a single human hair. They can hold even tinier droplets of blood, whose volumes could approach only one-billionth that of a whole test tube. “We developed technologies to generate droplets at very high speeds – say, 1,000 droplets per second,” Dr Shum explained. “We can merge droplets, inject things into droplets, and detect what’s inside droplets.” Potentially, this technology could help researchers understand diseases better with data analytics. It could lead to diseases being detected faster and at an earlier stage. Convocation Newsletter 5