2024 marks the 15th anniversary of the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy of the University of Hong Kong and the launch of the Bachelor of Pharmacy degree, which is dedicated to training our next generation of pharmacists, who are uniquely suited to serving the community. This year, the Department, with the support of HKUMed, launched the first community pharmacy in Hong Kong. We are proud to have achieved this milestone in primary healthcare education, research and service. We pledge to continue to work with other healthcare professionals and the primary care sector to deliver this truly integrative multidisciplinary research and teaching initiative.

As the new Department Head, who joined HKUMed this year from a world-leading Pharmacy Department in King’s College London and was previously educated at University College London, I have been impressed with the level of dedication, expertise and collaborative spirit among the teachers and researchers in the Department. Over the past 15 years, as result of this dedication, the Department has developed a research-led pharmacy programme that is at the top in Asia, thanks to the development of basic knowledge in pharmaceutical processes, drugs chemistry and pharmacology tailored to tackle health issues in the body’s systems. Among our advantages are our small class size, providing our students with close interaction with world-class experienced teachers and researchers. We are always in open dialogue with our students and take their feedback seriously, to continuously revise our curriculum to suit the city’s and patients’ needs. We offer our students opportunities to study and conduct research abroad at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as part of our strategic partnerships with top pharmacy schools in Asia, Europe, Australia and North America.

In research, our department has gone from strength to strength and expanded on research themes, including therapeutic target identification, synthetic and natural drug discovery, understanding therapeutics’ fate in the body, formulation and pre/clinical translation, pharmacy practice, and medication safety. Our researchers benefit from state-of-the-art research infrastructure and access to the State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, the Metabolomics Research Centre, the Jockey Club STEM Lab of Nanomedicines for Advanced Therapies, and the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health. Flagship research findings in healthcare big data, vascular pharmacology, nanomedicine, metabolomics and TCM pharmaceuticals are disseminated in top tier journals, such as JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, and the Nature journals, which is a testimony to the high-quality research in the Department.