Rethinking Social Ventures in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has experienced a significant transformation in its understanding of business, which concerns the phenomenon of social ventures that attempt to combine a make money and do good approach and to apply business skills to address social needs. Social ventures live a mystical existence, as they are fully ignored from a legal perspective despite the recent reform of laws on charitable activities. This causes problems as to their general understanding, which the authors try to address with their own typology, systematically characterizing social ventures. Then the authors examine the legal environment of social ventures in Hong Kong and identify the challenges they face. Hong Kong\u27s company law and related public/administrative law issues are considered. The answer searched for is: what is the appropriate legal vehicle for social ven- tures, and what are the practical legal questions when a social venture wants to structure its make money and do good business? As to the first problem, the legal non-existence of social ventures results in coupled privileges- meaning a system which favors traditional business forms such as for-profit and not-for-profit companies and discourages doing good approaches by social ventures. The authors identify instances where privileges crediting charitable activities are coupled with not-for-profit status, and propose solutions under which social ventures could be registered and have tax privileges efficiently assigned by a one-stop supervision body. As to the second problem, the situation of social ventures abandoning their mission of doing good poses further challenges to the legal system, and the authors propose a regime under which business organizations can easily adopt or abandon a social mission based on a partial application of the cy-pres doctrine. The authors come to the conclusion that the social venture sector bears immense potential for Hong Kong as well as for all of Asia. But in order to use this potential, Hong Kong has to show a more refined understanding and has to be open to a profound discussion

Development of a methodology for large-scale production of prions for biological and structural studies

Prion diseases are a group of infectious neurodegenerative diseases produced by the conversion of the normal prion protein (PrPC) into the disease-associated form (PrPSc). Extensive evidence indicate that the main or sole component of the infectious agent is PrPSc, which can replicate in affected individuals in the absence of nucleic acids. However, the mechanism of PrPC-to-PrPSc conversion remains elusive, which has been attributed to the lack of sufficient structural information of infectious PrPSc and a reliable system to study prion replication in vitro. In this article we adapted the Protein Misfolding Cyclic Amplification (PMCA) technology for rapid and efficient generation of highly infectious prions in large-scale. Murine prions of the RML strain were efficiently propagated in volumes up to 1,000-fold larger than conventional PMCA. The large-scale PMCA (LS-PMCA) procedure enabled to produce highly infectious prions, which maintain the strain properties of the seed used to begin the reaction. LS-PMCA was shown to work with various species and strains of prions, including mouse RML and 301C strains, hamster Hyper prion, cervid CWD prions, including a rare Norwegian CWD prion, and human CJD prions. We further improved the LS-PMCA into a bioreactor format that can operate under industry-mimicking conditions for continuous and unlimited production of PrPSc without the need to keep adding brain-derived prions. In our estimation, this bioreactor can produce in 1d an amount of prions equivalent to that present in 25 infected animals at the terminal stage of the disease. Our LS-PMCA technology may provide a valuable tool to produce large quantities of well-defined and homogeneous infectious prions for biological and structural studies

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field