The View | Hong Kong investor Danny Yeung dives into biotech after trying out mango shakes and retail shop bought out by Groupon

Danny Yeung has been called a serial entrepreneur, having dabbled in everything from mango shakes to furniture to a Hong Kong-based internet retailer that was bought out by Groupon, who then put him in charge of its East Asian operations.

The San Francisco native is now an investor in and chief executive officer of a local biotech firm. So one can’t help but to ask him jokingly if he is the Martin Shkreli of Hong Kong.

“I’m the opposite,” he says of the controversial American hedge fund manager. “Shkreli bought into a pharmaceutical company, then raised the price of its medicine, hurting people. I want to do good.”

His company, Prenetics, is part of the growing personalised medicine trend that evolved from the mapping of the human genome.

The information that can be derived from individual genomes is broad; the actress Angelina Jolie was able to identify the same genes that triggered her mother’s fatal breast cancer, and as a result Jolie took radical preventative measures, including undergoing a double mastectomy.

Prenetics’ focus is limited to pharmacology: it tests DNA to give doctors more tailored information on drug treatments for a range of ailments, including depression and heart conditions. I took the test, which involves a cotton swab inside the cheek, and found that I have a specific genetic variant of a protein coding gene in the liver, called SLCO1B1. As a result, there are certain types of cholesterol-lowering drugs that I would not metabolise well.

Personalised medicine is new and fairly limited in Asia, but is taking off in the United States. Some are enthusiastic about this evolving technology, others say it is just another expense without commensurate benefits.