Chwee Teck Lim’s Biography

Chwee Teck Lim, Provost’s Chair Professor, Principal Investigator, Mechanobiology Institute, National University of Singapore

Professor Lim is Provost’s Chair Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include the mechanobiology of human diseases and the development of microfluidic technologies for disease detection, diagnosis and therapy. He has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed papers (including 43 invited/review articles) and delivered more than 290 invited talks. He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering as well as an elected member of the World Council of Biomechanics. He currently sits on the editorial boards of 13 international journals. Prof Lim co-founded four startups which are commercializing technologies developed in his lab. He and his team have garnered more than 50 research awards and honors including the Asian Scientist 100 (2016), University’s Outstanding Researcher and Outstanding Innovator Awards (2014), the Credit Suisse Technopreneur of the Year Award, Wall Street Journal Asian Innovation Award (Gold) and the Asian Entrepreneurship Award (First Prize) (2012), President’s Technology Award (2011) and the IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award (2010).

Microfluidic Technologies for Liquid Biopsy & Precision Medicine

Capturing of circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) from the peripheral blood of patients (a.k.a. liquid biopsy) can potentially lead to applications in cancer diagnosis and personalized medicine.   Using a label-free approach via our developed microfluidic biochips, we not only show successful detection and retrieval of CTCs, but also how selective capturing of each single CTCs can lead to downstream single cell analysis and enable personalized treatment through the detection of specific actionable or druggable mutation.