Choong Chin Liew – Honourary Chairman
Professor Choong Chin Liew received his PhD in Pathological Chemistry in 1967 from the University of Toronto. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Clinical Biochemistry and Medicine at the University of Toronto and was Visiting Professor and Senior Geneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He co-founded and was chief scientist of GeneNews Corporation, a publicly traded biotechnology company based in Richmond Hill, Ontario, and is founder and chair of GeneNews Diagnostics (Malaysia) and Golden Health Diagnostics Inc., China.
His main field of research is molecular biology and disease-specific genomics. In the late 1990s his team at the Cardiac Gene Unit, University of Toronto, sequenced more than 57,000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) generated from 13 different cDNA libraries of cardiovascular tissues. Published in Circulation in 1997, this work, the most comprehensive analysis of cardiovascular genes to date, has provided the largest existing database for a single human organ, and is key to facilitating understanding of cardiovascular development and complex heart diseases. At his Brigham and Woman's Hospital laboratory, Professor Liew was actively involved in developing the potential of microarray technology in the discovery of molecular signatures for cardiovascular and other diseases.
