A research team led by Dr Hani El-Nezami and Dr Gianni Panagiotou, of the School of biological Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with the HKU Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine and the School of Medicine, University of Eastern Finland, develops a novel probiotic mixture “Prohep” that may have potential therapeutic effects on Hepatocellular carcinoma.

Hepatocellular carcinoma is the second most deadly cancer type globally and accounts for most liver cancers. The research team found that Prohep, when tested on mice, could slow down the tumor growth significantly and reduce the tumor size and weight. A reduction of the tumor weight and size by 40% was revealed following feeding a mouse model with Prohep one week before the tumor injection (group 3 in photo). The findings have been published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (please click https://hku.hk/f/news/14516/PNAS_paper.pdf for the PNAS article), a top international journal which publishes articles with original scientific research of exceptional importance.

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