Vice-Premier Han Zheng (3rd from right) joins the panel discussions by lawmakers from Hong Kong in Beijing on March 4, 2019. [Photo/Xinhua] Vice-Premier Han Zheng called upon national legislators from Hong Kong on Wednesday to pay special attention to the city's youth, to help them grasp opportunities presented by the country's major strategies. Han, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, focused on the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. He made the remarks during a closed-door meeting with 36 Hong Kong deputies to the National People's Congress, the country's top legislature, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. According to Hong Kong NPC deputy Wong Yuk-shan, who was in the closed meeting, Han said the younger generation will be the major driving force in the development of both the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the nation. Another NPC deputy from Hong Kong, Ma Fung-kwok, said all deputies should take the initiative to listen to the voices of the younger generation and encourage them to participate in the country's development. Han told deputies to treat young people as their own children, put themselves into their shoes and communicate with them in ways they understand, Wong said. Saying that the Greater Bay Area blueprint provides a steppingstone for Hong Kong's development, Han pledged that the central government will release additional measures to support the younger generation. custom bar braceletcustom sports braceletscustom logo wristbandsde securite pour personne ageeembossed wristbandscolorfilled wristbandsembossed printed wristbandsdual layer wristbands
(From left) Mr Duan Xin, Dr Lin Xudong, Dr Shi Peng, Professor Cheng Shuk Han and Dr Wang Xin. [Photo/City University of Hong Kong] HONG KONG - A research team led by the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has developed a new platform to enhance the prediction of effectiveness of medicines treating brain diseases, the university told reporter on Monday. The result came after five years of collaboration between CityU's Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Department of Biomedical Sciences (BMS), and Harvard Medical School, the United States, aiming to provide a platform to predict compounds that have the potential to be developed into new drugs to treat brain diseases. The research team generated the maps from the brains of thousands of zebrafish larvae, each treated with a clinically used CNS drug. The maps showed the corresponding brain regions that reacted to those drugs. By employing machine learning strategy, the team predicted that 30 out of those 121 new compounds had anti-seizure properties. To validate the prediction, the research team randomly chose 14 from the 30 potential anti-seizure compounds to perform behavioral tests with induced seizure zebrafishes. The result showed that 7 out of 14 compounds were able to reduce the seizures of the zebrafish without causing any sedative effects, implying a prediction accuracy of around 50 percent. Shi Peng, Associate Professor of CityU's BME, said that the team used robotics, microfluidics and hydrodynamic force to trap and orient an awake zebrafish automatically in 20 seconds, which allowed the imaging for many zebrafishes to be carried out in one go. More importantly, our platform can immobilize the fish without anaesthesia, thus avoiding interference, he added. With this high-speed in vivo drug screening system combined with machine learning, Shi said that a shortcut is provided to help identify compounds with significantly higher therapeutic potentials for further development, hence speed up the drug development and reduce the failure rate in the process. The research is published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
