Wong continued his postdoctoral research work with George M. Whitesides at Harvard University from 1982 to 1983, then began his independent career at Texas A&M University in the Chemistry Department. During his tenure at Texas A&M University, he went through the ranks including Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Chemistry. Wong was appointed as the Ernest W. Hahn Chair and Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and while he was a faculty member at Scripps, he also served as head of the Frontier Research Program on Glycotechnology at Riken in Japan and Director of the Genomics Research Center at Academia Sinica, and was later appointed by the President of the Republic of China as the President of Academia Sinica. Now, he is serving at the Scripps Research Institute as Scripps Family Chair Professor of Chemistry. Wong is best known for his original contributions to glycoscience, especially his development of chemo-enzymatic methods for the practical synthesis of oligosaccharides and glycoproteins and the hierarchical and programmable one-pot synthesis method for the rapid preparation of a large number of oligosaccharides. The original synthetic methods developed by Wong along with his work on the development of glycan microarrays for the high-throughput analysis of protein-carbohydrate interaction and the design of glycosylation probes have enabled not only the fundamental study of glycosylation in biology but also the clinical development of carbohydrate-based medicines, including vaccines and homogeneous antibodies for the treatment of cancers and infectious diseases.
Wong obtained many patents for his inventions. His representative patents include Globo-H and related anti-cancer vaccines with novel glycolipid adjuvants, Glycan arrays on PTFE-like aluminum coated glass slides and related methods, Methods and compositions for immunization against virus, Large scale enzymatic synthesis of oligosaccharides, Methods for modifying human antibodies by glycan engineering, Compositions and methods relating to universal glycoforms for enhanced antibody efficacy, Crystal structure of bifunctional transglycosylase PBP1b from E. Coli and inhibitors thereof, Quantitative analysis of carbohydrate-protein interactions using glycan microarrays: determination of surface and solution dissociation constants, Antibiotic compositions and related screening methods, Hirsutella Sinensis mycelia compositions and methods for treating sepsis and related inflammatory responses, and Tailored glycoproteomic methods for the sequencing, mapping and identification of cellular glycoproteins.
