Research Highlights
ADVANCING CHANGE
HKUST faculty members have continued to make significant
contributions to academia and to the world through numerous
breakthroughs and innovations
ALZHEIMER’S DISCOVERY
The Morningside Professor of Life Science Prof Nancy Ip
(Life Science) and her research team discovered a novel
molecular target for Alzheimer’s disease, unveiling a
potential new therapy for the disease. The team found
that Aß can cause aberrant activation of the protein
EphA4, triggering a signaling pathway that results in
cognitive impairment. They demonstrated that EphA4
is the key player in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s
disease. The team then explored the potential of
manipulating this pathway as a possible therapeutic
intervention. Molecular docking analysis, undertaken
in collaboration with Prof Xuhui Huang (Chemistry),
saw the identification of a naturally occurring
compound from a traditional Chinese medicine
database. This small molecule can rescue the synaptic
impairment that underlies cognitive impairment as
well as reduce disease pathology in animal models,
demonstrating a potential new clinical intervention.
The ground-breaking discoveries have been published
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America (PNAS).
QUANTUM JUMP
Researchers led by Profs Iam Keong Sou, Jiannong
Wang, Rolf Lortz, and Kam Tuen Law (Physics) achieved
a breakthrough in topological superconductors
by fabricating a novel Bi
2
Te
3
/FeTe heterostructure
that enjoys rare two-dimensional super-conductivity at
t h e i n t e r f a c e . T h e y a l s o p r o v i d e d s t r o n g
evidence for the two-dimensional nature of the
superconductivity observed and addressed possible
mechanisms of this phenomenon. The topological
superconduc tor developed by HKUST can trap
a quasi-particle known as “Majorana fermion”,
predicted theoretically in 1937, and advance practical
development of a quantum computer.
20
RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
