Professor Siew Ng selected as a New Cornerstone Investigator
Professor Ng is the first clinician-scientist in Hong Kong to win this award. She and her colleagues have also just published a study with profound implications for the role of gut microbiota modulation in improving symptoms in people with long COVID.
The prestigious Tencent New Cornerstone Investigator Program (NCIP) award will provide Professor Siew Ng, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Medicine, with a five-year grant of 5 million RMB per year for experimental research.
NCIP is one of the most substantial independent, non-profit financial support initiatives for science within mainland China. Operating on the foundational belief of “backing individuals, rather than specific projects,” its goal is to offer consistent, long-term backing to a chosen cadre of outstanding researchers. This support enables them to conduct fundamental research and make pioneering strides from inception to innovation.
Croucher News caught up with Professor Ng recently to find out more about her work and what this new honour means for her.
Ng began by telling us how excited she was by this new award. “It’s really quite special for me,” she said. “One reason is that this is a highly competitive award, so being chosen is very satisfying and it is a testament to my team’s decade of hard work. Another is that the New Cornerstone Program provides flexibility in the use of funds, which allows me to really think outside of the box and do some blue skies thinking. Or, as Tencent call it, aim to move the field from 0 to 1 in a new area.”
.This is the first time this award has gone to a scientist doing clinical work in Hong Kong
“As this is the first time this award has gone to a scientist doing clinical work in Hong Kong,” she added, “it’s also very good for other clinicians to see this recognition of what we do.”
What approach will she take when using these new resources?“Well, I want to explore some crazier kinds of ideas, which the initial five-year funding allows me to do. I think science is sometimes advanced by ideas which may seem weird to others at first and may not be accepted for some time by the scientific community. So I’m not looking for just incremental steps here. I’m keen to pursue ideas that might shift the paradigm a bit.”
When we asked what kind of ideas she would be pursuing, Ng clearly showed her excitement and enthusiasm for her work. “Well, one of the things I want to explore is food. On an everyday level, we believe we understand that ‘we are what we eat’. But when it comes to the impact of what we eat upon the trillions of microorganisms inside us, the microbiome, we don’t really know very much. As you’ll be aware, there’s a huge interest these days in the microbiome. It’s even been on the front page of ‘The Economist’, for instance. But while we understand that these microbes are fundamental to human health and the risk of diseases, we are only just beginning to find out how or why. As ‘The Economist’ said, we are at the beginning of the microbial-medicine revolution.”
Our microbiome, not just our genes, plays a significant role in the impact of our health, as seen in cases of obesity.
“We all know that some people eat a lot but don’t gain weight, while others, on the other hand, eat little, but gain weight. We’re seeing that the microbiome has something to do with this. And there is a similar influence on many other conditions, including mental health issues. I want to move us towards a more personalised kind of therapy, based on analysis of your own microbiome, the trillions of microorganisms you carry around, and your individual needs. At the moment, we can use faecal microbiota transplantation very effectively, but it is not yet targeted. Ideally, we’d have a more tailor-made approach based on the patient’s own requirements. So what I’m looking for is not just blue skies thinking but also something that will end in better therapies.”
As a further indication of the impact of this area of research, since our interview, Professor Ng and her colleagues have published a study with profound implications for the role of gut microbiota modulation in improving symptoms in people with long COVID. These findings have recently been published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, which is published by The Lancet Group.
Their randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial showed that an oral microbiome microencapsulated formula (SIM01) led to significant improvements in gut microbiota composition and alleviation of long COVID symptoms.
It is clear that Ng has an inspiring, long-term vision of where her work was heading. We asked her whether there were any scientists who had, in turn, particularly inspired her.
“One of the scientists who has inspired me was Ralph Steinman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2011 for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity. You know, for years nobody believed him that this kind of cell even existed! I think that kind of determination to continue your work in the face of the scepticism of others is a key quality in a scientist.”
Ng told us that she was driven by curiosity as a child, especially about the human body, which led to her becoming a doctor. Then, after she began practising medicine, she realised that, not only could she help individuals that she treated, she could also bring benefit to all patients with a particular condition if she was able to conduct research and come up with a breakthrough treatment for it. “So that’s how I became a researcher,” she said.
When we asked whether she had faced any particular issues as a woman in the male-dominated world of science, she said, “no, I haven’t. And we see more women in science now than we used to. For example, the majority of scientists at our lab in the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park are female. But I’d like to see more women in leadership positions in science.”
And finally, what was her larger-scale ambition for these next few years?
“One of the issues I want to address is how to preserve the good bacteria in the human microbiome, which are gradually being depleted by factors such as consumption of ultra-processed food. We need to preserve the good bacteria before it’s gone. I’d love to create a microbiome vault, like a Noah’s Ark, which can be put to future therapeutic use. To do that, I’d need to work with a larger population, so I’m really hoping to work across the Greater Bay Area, with its population of 80 million. That would be exciting.”
[Editorial note: This article was modified on 11 December to include details of a key study by Professor Ng and her colleagues published on 7 December in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.]