Clinical Departments and Research Strengths: Liver Transplantation, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Cardiology, Oncology and Metabolism

This article is the departmental-strongpoints chapter of Module 11 Medicine/Hospitals of "The Wild History of HKU". The Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine (HKUMed) uses Queen Mary Hospital as its principal teaching hospital, making it a major hub for clinical and translational medicine in the Asia-Pacific. This chapter profiles each of its main clinical departments and world-class strengths, and maps its network of State Key Laboratories. The focus throughout is a three-way exploration of "department — strength — breakthrough".

For the Faculty's structure and curriculum, see ./li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md; for teaching hospitals, see ./teaching-hospitals.md; for the School of Public Health, see ./school-of-public-health-and-chinese-medicine.md. This module belongs to the 00–12 reference zone and carries no credibility badges; neutral academic achievements are recorded with their attributed names. Data current as of June 2026.

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# 1. Overview (At a Glance)

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# 2. Department of Surgery: The World's Paradigm for Living-Donor Liver Transplantation

# 2.1 Fan Sheung-tat and Adult-to-Adult Right-Lobe Living-Donor Liver Transplantation (1996)

The Department of Surgery's most globally influential achievement is adult-to-adult living-donor right-lobe liver transplantation. According to Fan Sheung-tat's profile at the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences^※ and multiple peer-reviewed publications, in 1996, Professor Fan Sheung-tat pioneered the use of right-lobe liver grafts for adult-to-adult living-donor liver transplantation — a technique subsequently adopted worldwide and widely regarded as a landmark breakthrough in the history of liver transplantation.

Before this, living-donor transplants typically used smaller left-lobe grafts, which struggled to provide sufficient liver volume for adult recipients. The right-lobe approach solved the critical bottleneck of "insufficient graft volume," turning adult living-donor transplantation into a feasible, routine procedure across the globe.

# 2.2 Lo Chung-mau and the Queen Mary Hospital Liver Transplant Centre

Fan's student, Professor Lo Chung-mau of the Department of Surgery, carried the technique forward and developed it further. According to Lo Chung-mau's profile at the HKU Department of Surgery^※, his pioneering work in adult right-lobe living-donor liver transplantation "revolutionised liver transplant practice globally, putting Hong Kong on the world map of liver transplantation". Both men's work was carried out at Queen Mary Hospital's Liver Disease Centre and within the HKU Department of Surgery.

Queen Mary Hospital has been Hong Kong's designated liver transplant centre since 2003^※ (see ./teaching-hospitals.md).

# 2.3 Other Divisions within Surgery

According to the department's official pages, Surgery comprises multiple clinical divisions, including: cardiothoracic surgery, colorectal surgery, endocrine surgery, oesophageal and upper gastrointestinal surgery, head and neck surgery, plastic and reconstructive surgery, hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery, liver transplantation, neurosurgery, otorhinolaryngology, paediatric surgery, vascular surgery, and urology^※. The cardiothoracic division moved to Queen Mary Hospital in 2008^※, working alongside the heart transplant team at Grantham Hospital.

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# 3. Orthopaedics and Traumatology: The "Hong Kong Operation" for Spinal Tuberculosis

The Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology's world-class reputation also began with a breakthrough in surgical approach — albeit a full four decades before liver transplantation.

According to the department's official history page^※, in 1951 the Department of Surgery (under Professor Francis E. Stock) decided to establish an orthopaedics and traumatology unit, recruiting A.R. Hodgson from Britain to lead it. At the time, Hong Kong saw roughly 500 new cases of bone and joint tuberculosis a year, with spinal tuberculosis among the most intractable. The conventional approach — debriding from a posterior (back) approach — yielded poor results. In 1955, Hodgson and his team pioneered anterior spinal fusion for spinal tuberculosis: entering directly from the front of the body to debride the lesion and place bone grafts, a route of access almost unheard of in orthopaedics at the time. The paper describing the operation was published in the British Journal of Surgery in 1956, and the procedure was subsequently dubbed the "Hong Kong Operation" by the international orthopaedic community — still a classic template in the surgical history of spinal tuberculosis.

Hodgson's student Arthur Yau (姚祟廉) later extended the anterior approach beyond spinal tuberculosis to other pathologies and deformity correction, and together with colleagues developed the "halopelvic traction" technique, further widening the scope of anterior spinal surgery. According to the department's research centre page^※, the department established the Orthopaedic Research Centre in 1995, with roughly 8,000 square feet of laboratory space across the Faculty of Medicine building and the Duchess of Kent Children's Hospital; in 2003 it added a trauma division focused on internationalised trauma research, and is now a Level 1 trauma centre. Spinal surgery has thus remained one of the department's enduring strengths.

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# 4. Microbiology and Public Health: Frontlines of Two Coronavirus Pandemics

In the 2003 SARS outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the Department of Microbiology and the School of Public Health twice found themselves at the very front edge of global research. According to HKU's official "Remembering SARS 2003" page^※, under the leadership of virology division head Malik Peiris (who joined HKU in 1995) and Microbiology departmental head Yuen Kwok-yung, the HKU team isolated and cultured the SARS virus and systematically proved that a coronavirus was its causative agent (The Lancet, 2003). Yuen's team also traced the SARS coronavirus's genetic origins to wild bats and, from 2003 onward, discovered more than 30 novel human and animal coronaviruses — including human coronavirus HKU1, named after the University, first detected in a Hong Kong man with pneumonia in 2004. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Peiris and colleagues produced some of the first microscope images of the virus replicating inside cells, and quickly established diagnostic methods for SARS-CoV-2 that were shared, on request, with more than 70 countries and regions.

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# 5. Department of Medicine: A Clinical Landscape of 13 Divisions

The Department of Medicine is one of the Faculty's largest clinical departments. According to the department's official "Divisions/Centres/Units" page^※, it comprises 13 divisions:

# 5.1 Cardiology and Heart Transplantation

Hong Kong's heart transplantation service, per Hospital Authority materials^※, began with a heart transplant team established in 1991; the first successful transplant was performed at Grantham Hospital in 1992. Grantham has since served as the territory-wide tertiary referral centre for heart transplantation. The Department of Medicine's cardiology division, the surgical cardiothoracic team, and Grantham's cardiology department collaborate to sustain the service. Arrhythmia management and implantable-device therapy count among the department's longstanding strengths (per the academic profile of Honorary Clinical Professor Lau Chu-pak^※).

# 5.2 Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism

The Endocrinology and Metabolism division carries international influence in diabetes, obesity and adipokine research. According to the English Wikipedia entry on Karen Lam^※, Karen Lam is the Rosie T.T. Young Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at HKU, with research focused on diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease, with particular emphasis on adipose hormones. Professor Aimin Xu has made systematic contributions to the adipokine network, notably adiponectin, and serves as director of the State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology^※.

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# 6. Obstetrics and Gynaecology: Reproductive Medicine and the AI-Assisted Fertility Breakthrough

Since launching its in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) programme in July 1986, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology has been one of Hong Kong's principal reproductive medicine centres — not the territory's first (CUHK began in late 1984), but, per a review of Hong Kong's IVF landscape in the Hong Kong Medical Journal^※, among the earliest public-sector programmes to follow. It now runs the HKU–QMH CARE reproductive medicine centre, with services extending to the reproductive medicine and prenatal diagnosis centre at HKU-Shenzhen Hospital (see ./hku-shenzhen-hospital-reform.md).

The most eye-catching recent breakthrough came in 2025. According to the Faculty's official press release^※, a team led by Philip Chiu (邱志广) and William Yeung (杨树标) of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, together with Professor Yu Lequan's team from the Faculty of Computing and Data Science, developed the world's first AI model that identifies "fertilisation-competent sperm" by analysing the sperm's ability to bind to the egg's zona pellucida — with clinical validation accuracy exceeding 96%. The model was trained on more than 1,000 sperm microscope images and externally validated on over 40,000 images from 117 men; in 2025 it also won a silver medal at the 50th International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva. Male factors account for roughly 20%–70% of infertility cases, and traditional microscope assessment depends on operator judgement; this tool automates and quantifies the assessment, providing finer-grained evidence for personalised fertility treatment.

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# 7. Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine: Rare-Disease Genetic Diagnosis and the Hong Kong Genome Project

The Department of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine has long worked in rare diseases, neuromuscular disorders and genetic diagnosis, and is one of the principal clinical departments in the Hong Kong Genome Project (HKGP) — a scheme targeting patients with rare diseases and hereditary cancers, with the goals of raising diagnostic rates, nurturing genomics talent, and improving genomic-data representation for Chinese populations.

Per the HKGP pilot study published in The Lancet Regional Health — Western Pacific^※, short-read whole-genome sequencing established a molecular diagnosis for 24% of participants, with long-read sequencing adding a further 4%; of the newly identified pathogenic variants, roughly a third had not been previously reported. The department's genetic counselling and natural-history studies of rare diseases form the clinical backbone of this diagnostic pipeline; it also sustains systematic case-cohort research on genotype–phenotype associations in neuromuscular disease and on rare childhood neurological conditions such as autoimmune encephalitis.

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# 8. Clinical Oncology and Cancer Research

The Department of Clinical Oncology, per its official "About Us" page^※, is a major centre for both clinical and non-clinical research, known above all for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) — a cancer with high incidence in southern China and a long-standing research focus shared by both of Hong Kong's medical faculties. Together with the Medicine division of Haematology, Medical Oncology and HSCT, and the solid-tumour teams across Surgery, these groups make up HKU's oncology clinical and research network.

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# 9. Other Clinical Departments at a Glance: Ophthalmology, Psychiatry, Pathology and Support Disciplines

Beyond the departments highlighted above, the School of Clinical Medicine of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine comprises 14 clinical departments in all. According to the English Wikipedia entry on the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine^※ and the Faculty's official department list^※, the remaining departments each hold a clearly defined specialist remit, together forming a complete tertiary clinical network:

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# 10. State Key Laboratories: HKU Medicine's "National Team"

HKU hosts several State Key Laboratories (SKLs), of which those most closely tied to medicine, per the HKU Research Services page on State Key Laboratories^※, are:

According to HKU's own account^※, the Emerging Infectious Diseases SKL was among the first State Key Laboratories established outside mainland China. As components of the national research system, these laboratories serve as bases for top-tier basic research and talent development, coupling HKU Medicine's three clinical strengths — infectious disease, liver disease and metabolism — to national-level research platforms.

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# 11. Cross-References

• Faculty structure, the five schools, MBBS: ./li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md
• Teaching hospitals (Queen Mary, Grantham, Shenzhen), transplant hubs: ./teaching-hospitals.md
• HKU-Shenzhen Hospital (reproductive medicine centre): ./hku-shenzhen-hospital-reform.md
• Faculty of Dentistry: ./faculty-of-dentistry.md
• School of Nursing history: ./school-of-nursing-history.md
• School of Public Health (WHO role), Chinese medicine: ./school-of-public-health-and-chinese-medicine.md
• University-wide research and State Key Laboratories: ../04-research/

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