Prof Wai-Shiu Fred Wong joined the Department of Pharmacology at The National University of Singapore (NUS) since 1995, and built the Respiratory Pharmacology Laboratory. Dr. Wong is a Professor of the Department of Pharmacology, a former Head of the Department (2014-2020) and a former Assistant Dean and Vice Dean (2009-2014) of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore.

He is the Director of the Drug Discovery and Optimization Platform in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. He is the Principal Investigator of the Singapore-HUJ Alliance for Research and Enterprise (SHARE). Dr. Wong is the founding President of the Singapore Pharmacological Society. Dr. Wong’s research interest is to identify therapeutic targets and to discover and develop pharmacological agents for the treatment of airway inflammation, oxidative and DNA damage and re modelling in asthma and in COPD, using small molecule drugs, herbal medicinal bioactive molecules, antisense oligonucleotides (ASO)/siRNA technology, and pharmacoproteomics and metabolomics approaches. He has published a series of mechanism-based drug discovery studies targeting at tyrosine kinases, p38a MAPK, PI3K,GSK-3b, RIP2, RPS3 andAT2R responsible for asthma and COPD pathogenesis, that has paved the way for further investigation and innovative development of specific therapeutic strategies for asthma and COPD. Natural compounds like the diterpenoid lactone andrographolide and calcaratarin D, vitamin E isoform g-tocotrienol, and anti-malarial drug artesunate were first reported by his laboratory to possess anti-inflammatory actions in both asthma and COPD. His laboratory has also identified lungkine, ApoL2 and HDM-induced DNA damage as potential mechanisms for asthma development.

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