Yihuo Bio, a biotechnology startup headquartered in the United States, recently announced plans to build research-and-development centers and factories in China before June to produce a new device that could revolutionize detection of lung cancer. The plan awaits approval from Chinese health authorities.

The device, which would be produced on a massive scale, adopts a new cancer-detection method developed by scientists from UCLA, which utilizes a novel technology called electric field-induced release and measurement to test saliva for epidermal gene mutations, a sign of lung cancer.

"Prevention and early detection are critically important for reducing mortality caused by cancer, but a vast majority of patients do not realize they have developed cancer until it is too late," says Liao Wei, founder and CEO of the startup.

"Our saliva-based detection device provides a simple, noninvasive, and promisingly reliable method to diagnose lung cancer in very early stage."

Gene mutations exist in lung-cancer patients of all stages, but in early stages such changes are often too subtle to be detected with previously used detection methods, especially those associated with body-fluid testing, Liao says.

In China, lung cancer replaced liver cancer as the leading cause of deaths in 2008, and accounted for about 25 percent of all new cancer cases in the country in 2011, according to China’s National Central Cancer Registry.

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