The race is on to develop a vaccine against COVID-19.
At least 70 potential treatments are in development, with three at the clinical stage when human trials begin.
Outside China, the US is the only other country undertaking human testing.
America’s top medical expert Anthony Fauci has said a vaccine could be ready within 12 to 18 months.
But health officials elsewhere say it could take even longer, as others warn against rushing the process.
John Nicholls is the clinical professor of pathology at the University of Hong Kong.
His team was one of the first outside mainland China to reproduce COVID-19 in a laboratory for research.
He joins us on Skype from Hong Kong.
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In This Story: Hong Kong
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (HKSAR), is a metropolitan area and special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta of the South China Sea. With over 7.5 million residents of various nationalities in a 1,104-square-kilometre (426 sq mi) territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after the Qing Empire ceded Hong Kong Island at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898. The whole territory was transferred to China in 1997. As a special administrative region, Hong Kong maintains separate governing and economic systems from that of mainland China under the principle of “one country, two systems”.