Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Breaking the Wall of Viral Mutations and Genome Shuffling

Meng How Tan

Life Sciences

The nominating institute Nanyang Technological University on the breakthrough:

Infectious agents, including viruses like SARS-CoV-2, can wreak havoc on societies. Frequent testing is essential to minimise their transmission. However, viruses can mutate, edit, or shuffle their genetic material, causing diagnostic assays to fail. To overcome the problem, Meng How Tan has developed a robust and sensitive diagnostic test that can detect SARS-CoV-2 even when the viral sequence has evolved or has been edited.

Meng How Tan

Nanyang Technological University

Meng How Tan is a faculty at Nanyang Technological University and a Principal Investigator at A*STAR. His laboratory is interested in understanding how biological information hardwired in the genome of living cells can be permanently or transiently altered at both the DNA and RNA levels. He has received multiple awards for his work, including the Outstanding Young Principal Investigator Award (AIChE-SLS), National Science Scholarship (PhD) (A*STAR), Donald Wills Douglas Fellowship (Caltech), and Overseas Merit Scholarship (Open) (Singapore Government). He is also an EMBO Global Investigator.

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