Prof Datuk CC Liew

Prof. Choong-Chin Liew was born in Malaysia, educated in Malaysia and Singapore and received his PhD (1967) in pathological chemistry from the University of Toronto, Canada. He was professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology there from 1970 until retiring in 2003, and is currently Professor Emeritus (UT) and Visiting Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Over the course of his teaching career, Professor Liew trained more than two dozen PhD and MSc students and some 50 postdoctoral fellows. He is also a co-founder, director and Chief Scientist of GeneNews Limited, a publicly traded biotechnology company based in Toronto, Canada.

Professor Liew is a pioneer in the emerging field of molecular medicine and globally recognized as a leader in disease-specific genomics research. He has received some 14 Honorary Professorships in universities including The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Peking University, Beijing. In 2002 he won the Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America (SCBA) Distinguished Scientist Award (Ontario Chapter) and the Makoto Nagano Award for Achievements in Cardiovascular Education, and in 2005 the Nanyang Distinguished Alumni Award. 

To date, he has published more than 300 original scientific papers, abstracts, and monographs. His 1997 landmark publication in Circulation, a pre-eminent U.S. peer reviewed journal, reported his work in cardiovascular genomics. This report is widely acknowledged to represent the most comprehensive analysis of genes expressed in a single human organ. More recently Professor Liew and Dr Victor Dzau, Chancellor for Health Affairs of Duke University, published “Molecular Genetics and Genomics of Heart Failure in Nature Reviews Genetics (2004) and co-edited Cardiovascular Genetics and Genomics for the Cardiologist, published in July 2007 by Blackwell’s, Oxford. 

Currently Professor Liew is leading the research efforts of GeneNews to further develop the Sentinel PrincipleTM, a blood-based diagnostic technology that can identify molecular signatures for virtually any human disease. The Sentinel Principle was recognized in 2006 with the Frost and Sullivan North American Technology Innovation of the Year Award in the field of genetic biomarkers. 

In Malaysia, GeneNews has recently opened a new, state-of-the-art diagnostic laboratory (Mount Miriam Hospital) with a reference site (Lam Wah Ee Hospital) to focus on blood-based molecular tests for colorectal cancer, prostate cancer and other important cancers in Penang.  

In 2007 Professor Liew was honoured to receive the Darjah Yang Mulia Pangkuan Negeri (DMPN) conferred by the Governor of Penang.