Nobel Winner Seeks to Transform Medicine

When Professor Ferenc Krausz and his team became the first in the world to capture the motion of electrons in 2001 by producing attosecond pulses of light, he found himself at a crossroads. The discovery, which ultimately led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2023, had been driven by pure curiosity and the desire to achieve something that had never been done before. But now he wondered, was that enough?

“I repeatedly said to myself, well, this is very exciting and most probably we can do many exciting experiments by utilising these new technical capabilities. But is there possibly an application that could make a difference to people’s everyday lives?” he said.

It took 15 years of exploration to come up with an answer. Using attosecond technology, he and his team developed a screening method that identifies minuscule changes in the molecular composition of human blood – like an ‘infrared fingerprint’ – to flag various cancers and chronic conditions, such as diabetes, at the earliest stages. The method is cheap, comprehensive, non-invasive and risk-free, making it easy for people to be screened every year.

Initial results from testing on 15,000 participants in his native Hungary have been encouraging, but to be really convincing, it needs to be tested in other populations. With that mission in mind, Professor Krausz joined HKU’s Department of Physics in November 2025 as the Chair of Laser Physics.

“One of my main motivations for coming here is the outstanding, world-class healthcare system in Hong Kong and the world-class medical expertise both at the University of Hong Kong and other universities here. We want to prove that our method is universal and can be applied to any ethnicity,” he said.

A million samples

His technology works by illuminating a thin blood sample with a short infrared laser pulse. This excites molecules which in turn start vibrating and emitting infrared light. The latter conveys a dense amount of information about the blood’s molecular composition and reveals changes from disease at the microscopic level, and it can be quickly analysed using an algorithm developed by Professor Krausz and his team.

Having tested the technology in Hungary over the past decade, he is now preparing to replicate that study here in Hong Kong, working closely with HKU’s world-class Clinical Trials Centre and other faculties and universities in the city, and run a parallel study in Germany. Together, the three studies will collect about one million blood samples – over a period of 10 years – to train the algorithm to detect the most prevalent chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, respiratory and metabolic disorders and many types of cancer.

“If everything goes according to our plans, then by 2035 we should have this screening algorithm in place, and the healthcare systems of these three regions could start broad population screening,” he said.

“I think it is not an exaggeration that this will catapult these three regions to the forefront of medical and biotechnological research and render them global pioneers of future personalised preventive care.”

Asking questions and giving back

Professor Krausz’s high confidence comes from the foundations of his upbringing by his bricklayer father and homemaker mother, who raised him to work hard towards his goals, be persistent and believe in his abilities. Added to those qualities are his remarkable intellectual discipline and his ability to formulate meaningful goals, such as setting out to determine whether the attosecond could be captured and whether it could be applied in healthcare.

“It’s incredibly important to start research with the right question because this is the compass that allows us to stay focussed. In scientific research, with every step we take, we bump into exciting questions. Each of them would deserve some detailed investigation and offer the potential to uncover new knowledge, so we are highly tempted to look into them. But does this bring us any closer to answering the question we are after?” If not, he will not pursue it.

Humility was also instilled in him as a youth, and Professor Krausz sees his achievements, including his Nobel Prize, as a recognition not only of his own work but the input of his team and mentors, ranging from his grammar school teachers to his colleagues in organisations such as the Vienna University of Technology, where he made the attosecond discovery in ‘a very dark and unspectacular small laboratory’.

His gratitude for that support has inspired him to give back beyond academia. His winnings from his Nobel and other prizes have been used to support STEM development among high school students in Hungary, and to pay teachers in Ukraine to provide free extracurricular academic and sports classes for children, especially in rural areas.

“It is quite possible that the next Einstein could be born there and we should undertake everything we can so those next generations can realise their dreams,” he said.