Campus Digest

Father of systems biology Professor Leroy Hood outlines new era of personalised healthcare at HKBU IoC distinguished lecture

Thursday, 22 October 2026

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Professor Leroy Hood, an internationally renowned systems biologist, delivers a lecture at the HKBU Institute of Creativity’s Distinguished Lecture series on 2 October, sharing his insights and latest initiatives on deciphering biological complexity and developing tools to power data-driven personalised health.
Professor Hood (centre) is welcomed by Dr Kennedy Wong, Chairman of the Council and the Court (2nd right); Professor Alex Wai (2nd left), President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Liu Jiming (1st left); Interim Provost; and Professor Lyu Aiping (1st right), Vice-President (Research and Development) cum Dean of Graduate School.
Professor Alex Wai (2nd left), Professor Liu Jiming (2nd right), Professor Lyu Aiping (1st left) and Professor Johnny M Poon (1st right) present a certificate to Professor Hood (centre).
Professor Hood (front row, centre) poses with HKBU senior scholars. Front row (from left): Professor Lyu, Professor Wai, Professor Liu, and Professor Poon. Back row (from left): Professor Zhang Lu, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science; Professor Tian Liang, Associate Head and Associate Professor, Department of Physics; Professor Cheung King-ho, School of Chinese Medicine; Professor Christy Cheung, Chair Professor in Information Systems and Digital Innovation Management cum Director of Research Office; Professor Li Min, Dean and Chair Professor in Chinese Medicine; Professor Michael Ng, Dean of Faculty of Science and Technology cum Chair Professor in Mathematics and Data Science; and Professor Zhang Han, Dean and Chair Professor in Business.
Professor Lyu Aiping celebrates Professor Hood’s transformative contributions to biomedical science in his welcoming remarks, noting that his work not only decoded life but also gave us the tools to understand it.
Participants actively engage in the Q&A session, posing incisive questions to Professor Hood.

 

Professor Leroy Hood, an internationally renowned systems biologist, delivered a lecture entitled “At a Tipping Point: Data-Driven Individual Health That Will Lead to a Healthcare of Optimizing Wellness and Avoiding Disease” at the HKBU Institute of Creativity (IoC)’s Distinguished Lecture series on 2 October. Professor Hood shared his insights and latest initiatives on deciphering biological complexity and developing tools to power data-driven personalised health.

Professor Hood was welcomed by Dr Kennedy Wong, Chairman of the Council and the Court; Professor Alex Wai, President and Vice-Chancellor; Professor Liu Jiming, Interim Provost; Professor Lyu Aiping, Vice-President (Research and Development) cum Dean of Graduate School; and Professor Johnny M Poon, Associate Vice-President (Interdisciplinary Research).

Widely regarded as the father of systems biology, Professor Hood has fundamentally reshaped modern life sciences. He stands as one of only 20 scientists in history elected to all three U.S. National Academies (Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine), and his foundational contributions have earned science’s highest honours. Professor Hood co-founded in 2000 the Institute for Systems Biology, whose team includes Dr Mary Brunkow, a recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. While at Caltech, his laboratory developed four foundational instruments: the automated protein sequencer, DNA synthesiser, peptide synthesiser, and the automated fluorescent DNA sequencer. These groundbreaking technologies revolutionised genomics and served as the primary technological backbone for the Human Genome Project.

Professor Hood reflected on the early days of his studies in the field. “It was clear at that time that two things were missing. One, we didn’t have the technology for generating big data;  it’s big data that’s going to decipher biological complexity. Two, we didn’t understand, even if we had the big data, what we would do with it. And that later became systems biology,” said Professor Hood.

In the lecture, Professor Hood illustrated the relationship between the genome and the phenome. While an individual’s genotype sets the upper and lower boundaries of one’s health, one’s phenotype traverses between those boundaries from birth to death in response to lifestyle, environment and other influences.

Professor Hood pioneered the concept of P4 medicine: “predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory” in the early 2000s. By generating a dynamic, high-dimensional picture of a person’s health, researchers can identify opportunities for intervention before a disease develops.

These concepts were first put into practice through Arivale, a scientific wellness programme launched in 2015. Over four years, the programme analysed the genome and phenome data collected from 5,000 participants twice a year and converted the data into actionable possibilities with wellness and nutritional coaching to improve wellness and reduce disease risk.

Currently, through Phenome Health, a non-profit organisation, and the proposed Human Phenome Initiative, Professor Hood aims to collect longitudinal genome and phenome data from one million individuals.

Professor Hood’s team has also developed new AI tools to allow researchers to connect fragmented biomedical knowledge into traceable biological paths, interrelating all sorts of things that have never been related before to fill the gaps in wellness knowledge, and even develop peptide drugs.

He said: “Our vision is a world where everyone is empowered by their own data to improve wellness and prevent disease,” said Professor Hood.

To achieve that, he believes integrating Traditional Chinese Medicine into this emerging scientific framework would be the key and expressed a strong interest in collaborating with Chinese medicine researchers. “It's not going to be done by geroscience alone, and it's not going to be done by traditional Chinese medicine alone. It's going to be done by the integration of both of those into scientific wellness,” he said. “Scientific wellness is really going to encompass both the domains of geroscience and traditional Chinese medicine.”

This vision strongly resonates with HKBU’s strategic focus in Systems Health, spearheaded by the Institute of Systems Medicine and Health Sciences, opening promising possibilities for future synergy between international systems biology frameworks and innovative approaches in Chinese medicine and health sciences.

The lecture, jointly hosted by HKBU’s IoC and Institute of Systems Medicine and Health Sciences, is part of the Distinguished Lecture Series which brings world-class scholars to the University for high-level intellectual exchange.