Kwan Chee Allen Chan

Associate Vice President and Professor of Chemical Pathology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Allen Chan is a clinician-scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he chairs the Department of Chemical Pathology, holds the Tony Mok Shu Kam Professorship in Medicine and, since April 2025, serves as associate vice-president for knowledge transfer. He read medicine at the University of Hong Kong and took his doctorate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2001 under Dennis Lo, working on cell-free DNA circulating in blood plasma. That line of work produced the noninvasive prenatal test for Down syndrome, adopted in more than ninety countries, and now extends to early cancer detection, transplant monitoring and autoimmune disease. He is a co-inventor on more than 120 inventions with over 1,500 patents granted worldwide, has published some 192 peer-reviewed papers cited more than 16,000 times, and has secured research funding exceeding 1.17 billion Hong Kong dollars. Nature Biotechnology named him among its twenty leading translational researchers in 2020, and he has founded or co-founded four genomic diagnostics companies, including Xcelom and Insighta.