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Biography

Renee Chan is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Paediatrics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also the Co-Director of the CUHK-UMCU Joint Research Laboratory of Respiratory Virus & Immunobiology, Department of Paediatrics, CUHK, an investigator of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, Associate Researcher (by courtesy), CUHK Shenzhen Research Institute and the Co-Director of the CUHK-UMCU Joint Research Laboratory of Respiratory Virus & Immunobiology, Department of Paediatrics, CUHK.

Prof. Chan’s research on ex vivo organ cultures of human respiratory tract has been world-leading and led to major publications in high impact journals. She is among one of the few research groups worldwide that can routinely utilize ex vivo cultures of human respiratory tissues for phenotypic characterization and risk assessments. This is now included in the WHO “Tool for Influenza Pandemic Risk Assessment”.

Prof. Chan has conducted research work in multiple pandemics, SARS-CoV, pandemic H1N1/09, sporadic outbreaks of avian influenza/H5N1, H7N9, MERS-CoV and currently SARS-CoV-2. Her team derives age-group and disease-entity specific differentiated epithelial cell and organoid cultures, in collaboration with otorhinolaryngologists and cardiothoracic surgeons of CU Medicine & in the Hong Kong Children’s Hospital and scientists in the University Medical Centre of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

To date, Prof. Chan has published over 94 peer-reviewed research articles and has received 13 full-grants as Principal-investigator from 2010 to 2023 (HK$ 12.3M) and more than 12 full-grants as Co-I, 2010 to 2023 (HK$ 18.8M). Prof. Chan has received a number of awards for her research, including the Young Scientist Award (2010) of the Hong Kong Institution of Science.

Research Interests

• Development of non-invasive respiratory mucosal sample collection tools for the analyses of virus, antibody, microbiota and immune mediators
• Development and application of human primary respiratory epithelial cell models, including the air-liquid interface and the organoid cultures, to perform risk assessment for emerging infectious airway pathogens and research on the disease pathogenesis
• Understanding of the biology of:
  • viral interference observed in the epidemiological study
  • rhinovirus infection in the paediatric population
  • mucosal verse circulating immunoglobulins diversity
• Drug screening for acute and chronic respiratory diseases.

Selected Publications