Prof. Haitian Maggie WANG

Award Citation

Professor Maggie Wang, Associate Professor in the Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, is awarded with the RGC Research Fellow Scheme, for her research project “Integrated Computational Platform for Antigen Design of Therapeutic Vaccines for HPV-mediated Cervical Cancer”.

Professor Wang’s research focuses on bioinformatics and statistical genetics, with an emphasis on deciphering genomic patterns in viruses and humans to advance understanding of disease mechanisms and immunology. Her methodological innovations bridge novel insights of the genome and translational applications to facilitate vaccine development and precision medicine. Her research topics include virus evolution prediction, disease prediction, virus and human genetic epidemiology, and methods for vaccine antigen optimization.

In her awarded project, she will develop a therapeutic HPV vaccine candidate to treat cervical intra-epithelial neoplasia (CIN) caused by HPV infections, using a computational platform that integrates novel technologies invented by the research team. The objectives of this project include characterizing genomic variations of common HPV types in China, developing computational methods for T-cell epitope prediction to design epitope-enriched vaccine antigens, and optimizing antigen sequences using the research team’s proprietary protein codon optimization (PCO) technology, which has higher potency than existing approaches, to generate the final candidate. Beyond this project, the platform it establishes could also be applied to design antigens for other virus-mediated diseases and holds significant translational potential in the pharmaceutical industry. With collaborative efforts, the outcomes of this project will facilitate future innovative vaccine development in Hong Kong.