Members

THE BEL Team

Theo Aurich (2023-)

Theo is a 5th year medical student at the University of Heidelberg. He received the Carl Duisberg Fellowship in Medical Sciences to carry out a second medical doctoral thesis project at THE BEL. Previously, he spent two years investigating HSC development and specification in the group of Mick Milsom at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. At THE BEL, he will work towards improving hPSC-derived CAR-Macrophages to contribute to the development of next-generation cell therapies.

David Xiang, BSc (2021-)

David is a PhD Candidate in THE BELL. He obtained his bachelor degree from Fudan University focusing on Medical Chemistry & Pharmacology & Pharmaceutics. He did a research assistant & lab manager in Tsinghua University and a start-up company. He has accumulated both academic and industrial experience in CRISPR-Cas system, CAR-T preparation & TIL all-in-one therapy. He works on macrophage and cancer interactions.

Celine Chen (2021-)

Celine is a year three undergraduate student in the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong. She has studied stem cell engineering at the Andras Nagy lab in the University of Toronto. She majors in Biomedical Sciences and minors in Biotechnology & Clinical Research and Genetics & Genomics.

Sanxing Gao, MSc (2021-)

Sanxing is a PhD Candidate in THE BEL. He obtained his MSc from Huaqiao University, China focused on genetic engineering medicine. After graduation, he studied the CAR-T combined JAK-STAT pathway immunotherapy on melanoma and the role of neutrophil serine proteases in metabolic diseases respectively. He works on tumor microenvironment remodeling by immune priming cytokines.

Yiming Chao, MSc (2021-)

Yiming is a PhD Candidate in THE BEL. She is an informatics scientist in training co-supervised by Yuanhua Huang. She was trained by Bertie Gottgens (Cambridge U) and Jian Shu (Harvard Medical School). She obtained her Master of Medical Sciences degree from the University of Hong Kong in 2021. She is familiar with CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing, stem cell culture, brain organoid culture, and bioinformatic analysis. She works on cell fate determination of peri-implantation human embryoids.

Patrick Peleu, MSc (2023-)

Patrick studied a master’s program in molecular biology and genetics at the University of Pavia in Italy. He enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Pavia to work on CAR-T under Ermanno Gherardi and Hugo de Jonge. He is an exchange student at THE BEL. Patrick engineers CAR proteins against CD19 antigens on tumor cells and soluble scFvs to neutralize immune suppressors in the tumor.

Logan Tang (2023-)

Logan is a fourth-year biomedical sciences student at The University of Hong Kong. He joined THE BEL as a summer intern in 2020. He investigated macrophage skewing upon LDH-A inhibition under Dr Rio Sugimura’s guidance. He was granted the research internship award under the Undergraduate Research Fellowship Programme (URFP) at HKU and is returning as an undergraduate research fellow. He will continue to work as a final-year project student on SynNotch CAR-M.

Daniel Lei, PhD (2023-)

Daniel Lei joined THE BEL in 2023 as a visiting scientist. He is mentored by Jose-Carlos Segovia at CIEMAT, Madrid, and Rio Sugimura at HKU. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of Biomedical Science at The City University of Hong Kong (CityU). During his Ph.D., he expertise in optogenetics. He is working on the CRISPR-based screening of CAR-M.

Shihui Zhang, MSc (2022-)

Shihui is a PhD candidate in THE BEL. She obtained her dual bachelor degree from the Central South University, China and University of Dundee, UK (Hons) studying in Biological Science, and the following Master by Research degree from the University of Edinburgh under Katrin Ottersbach focusing on Bioinformatics. During her time as Master student, she found her interest into hematopoiesis and development. She works on i) genetic screening to fine-tune CAR signaling in macrophages and ii) forward programming approach to define immune function modules.

Sophronia Yip, BSc (2022-)

Sophronia is a MPhil student in THE BEL in collaboration with the Center for Translational Stem Cell Biology in Hong Kong. She obtained her bachelor degree from the University of Hong Kong and majored in biochemistry. During her undergraduate, she focused on elucidating the molecular mechanisms of stem cell differentiation and how it contributes to congenital disease using animal embryos as a model, where she discovered her interest in stem cell research. Her current work in the BEL focuses on developing functional CAR-macrophage from stem cells to remodel the tumor microenvironment and develop novel strategies to treat solid tumors.

Billy Chan (2023-)

Billy joins THE BEL as a summer intern in 2023. He is an undergrad at HKU. He will learn computational biology and cancer biology at THE BEL.

Alex To, BSc (2022-)

Alex is a research a MPhil student in The BEL. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Cell and Molecular Biology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). During his undergraduate, he worked as a student assistant in a laboratory at the CUHK, where he discovered his interest in cancer research. He works on i) novel organoids to study oncofetal niche in solid tumors and ii) cell fate prediction by morphology with Kevin Tsia. His favourite scientist is Richard Feynman.

Lu Liu, MSc (2023-)

Lu is a PhD Candidate in THE BEL. He specializes in NK cells engineering with industry background. He studied Animal Genetics during his master’s program at Nanjing Agricultural University, China. After graduation, he worked for Qihan Biotech, China, a world-leading company in xenotransplantation and iPSC-derived CAR-NK. At the Qihan R&D department, he developed the ADCC-CAR NK, CAAR (chimeric autoantigen receptor)-NK, and anti-HBV CAR-NK products under the guidance of Luhan Yang, Xiangjun He, and Jing Xu. His upcoming research involves utilizing pooled library screening in conjunction with neural networks to optimize CAR in macrophages.