Dr. Kan is a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Laboratory Medicine, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Louis K. Diamond Professor of Hematology. He graduated from the University of Hong Kong and received his clinical and research training at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School and the Royal Victoria Hospital at McGill University.  Dr. Kan carried out research for many years on thalassemia, sickle cell anemia and other genetic diseases. He discovered in 1974 that alpha thalassemia was due to a deletion of the alpha globin genes and rapidly applied it to develop a prenatal diagnosis DNA test. This was the first time a DNA test was used in human. Dr. Kan also identified in 1978 the first DNA polymorphism and related it to the sickle cell gene, a discovery that eventually led to the mapping of the human genome. Dr. Kan’s current work is directed towards the treatment of sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia using iPS cells and the CRISPR/Cas9 approach.

Dr. Kan received multiple honors and awards, most notably the Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award, the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, the Dameshek Award from the American Society of Hematology and the Allan Award from the American Society in Human Genetics.

A list of Dr. Kan’s published work can be found here