Christopher Wong

Biography

 As a technopreneur, I have been involved in developing technology and products for diagnostics, prognostics and theranostics, in the fields of cancer and infectious diseases, through interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts with academic and industry partners. Products developed previously include resequencing chips for SARS, Dengue and Influenza A H1N1(2009). A few years ago, I founded PathGEN Dx together with 3 other scientists (Martin Hibberd, Ken Sung, Charlie Lee) from GIS, to commercialise our platform which could detect >70,000 virus and bacteria genomes in parallel from patient samples.  Currently I am working on a large-scale inter-disciplinary collaborative project: POLARIS (Personalized OMIC Lattice for Advanced Research and Improving Stratification)  POLARIS is a strategic initiative for introducing and embedding OMIC information into the diagnosis and treatment of medical diseases in Singapore. It is a partnership initially between A*STAR, SingHealth and NUH, but open to other collaborators as the program matures. Initial disease focus areas are lung cancer, gastrointestinal cancer, eye and infectious diseases.  As Chief Operating Officer for POLARIS, I am responsible for all business development activities, partnerships and collaborations with industry and healthcare partners, as well as ensuring that the laboratory infrastructure and operations meets required standards for licensing and accreditation. In July 2014, POLARIS launched it's first clinical test, the POLARIS™ TGFBI test for identifying patients who may be at risk of developing corneal stromal dystrophy. Most recently in Nov 2016, POLARIS' accreditation by CAP (College of American Pathologists) was renewed. Postdocs, graduate students and returning A*STAR scholars who are interested in a career as an entrepreneur in the biotech/biomed fields are welcome to contact me.

Research Interest

 Biotechnology, Molecular Biology, genome, Techno entreprenuer