2025 Dr Stanley Ho Memorial Lecture: The Power and Potential of Genetics to Improve Healthcare
The Centre for Personalised Medicine were honoured to partner with our longstanding and loyal supporters the Dr Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation as well as the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Centre for Novostics for the 2025 Dr Stanley Ho Memorial Lecture on Friday 4th July at the Cho Yiu Conference Hall, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The lecture marked the 20th anniversary of the Dr Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation and celebrated The Power and Potential of Genetics to Improve Healthcare, featuring the distinguished Professor Sir Peter Donnelly FRS, FMedSci, Hon FIA. We are very pleased to share a recording of the lecture here.
With a career marked by ground-breaking contributions to human disease research, Professor Donnelly has transformed our understanding of meiotic recombination and pioneered innovative statistical methods that continue to shape modern healthcare. His leadership in key genetics projects over the past two decades has driven major advances in the field, profoundly impacting healthcare systems and patient outcomes.
The Power and Potential of Genetics to Improve Healthcare:
For all the common human diseases, and the common cancers, genetic variation is one key part of the differences between individuals in disease susceptibility. Environmental and lifestyle differences also play a central role for some of these diseases, while in others, genetics is the primary risk factor. Until recently, we have had no way of quantifying the genetic component of risk for common diseases like heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, or breast, prostate, and bowel cancer.
It turns out that there isn’t one, or even a few, genes for each of these diseases. Instead, for each disease, there are millions of positions in our DNA which contribute to our risk of developing the disease. Individually, each of these positions has only a very small effect, but together they can have a substantial impact. Some people can be 30 times more likely than others to develop the disease, solely because of the cumulative impact of their genetics.
A single test can now quantify someone’s genetic risk for each of the common diseases, when they are still healthy, years ahead of symptoms developing. Where appropriate, the genetic risk can be combined with other clinical risk factors to get a much better overall picture of their risk. Health systems already have pathways for people at increased risk of disease, through prevention, screening, and treatment programmes. But currently there are large numbers of people who are at high risk and are completely invisible to healthcare systems, because we haven’t been able to quantify their genetic risk.
These developments will seek to provide a new era in medicine, shifting it from treatment to prevention. Much more precise, personalised understanding of individual risk will enable health systems to get more of the right people into the right prevention, screening, and treatment programmes at the right time. This is good for the individual, as it either avoids disease entirely or catches it early when outcomes are much better, and good for health systems both in the short term in getting more value from their existing prevention and early-detection programmes, but also over the longer term in avoiding much higher costs after acute episodes. Moving healthcare upstream, to better prevention, is also essential to making health systems more sustainable in the longer term.