Lo Yuk-ming, a professor of chemical pathology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong best known for his contributions to non-invasive prenatal testing benefiting millions of mothers and newborns worldwide each year, said he plans to expand the technique to early cancer detection to improve survival rates among cancer sufferers.

His team is preparing multi-center clinical trials regarding early screening of pre-symptomatic patients suffering from nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a head and neck cancer, with the technology to detect circulating tumor DNA in their blood in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Lo said in Shanghai on Sunday after receiving the Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award. The area is a region in China with a higher incidence rate of the disease.

Lo said that his team published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017 after four years of research, showing that 70 percent of nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients screened by their technology are at phase I or II of the disease, while traditionally 76 percent of such patients are in phase III or IV when diagnosed.