On Sep. 28 (America), the 2022 Lasker Medical Research Awards, known as the "vane of the Nobel Prize", was announced. Yuk Ming Dennis Lo, director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and laureate of the 2016 Future Science Prize - Life Science, received the "2022 Lasker Clinical Medicine Award" for non-invasive prenatal test based on the original discovery of fetal DNA in maternal blood.

In 1997, Dr. Yuk Ming Dennis Lo and his colleagues reported that small fragments of extracellular DNA from the developing placenta were present in the circulation of pregnant women. Such a discovery revolutionized the field of prenatal screening. Today, the achievement has been recognized by the Lasker Foundation, which awarded Dr. Yuk Ming Dennis Lo the Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 2022. The award recognizes him "for the discovery of fetal DNA in maternal blood, leading to noninvasive prenatal testing for Down syndrome".

Dr. Lo's discovery marked a new path for detection, and in the following 14 years, further research by others confirmed his findings leading to the development of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) analysis methods for diagnosing fetal trisomy. This was validated through large-scale clinical trials. The first clinical screening tests were applied in 2011. 

Lo was not satisfied with the achievements of NIPT technology. He and his team began to wonder: what would happen if this technology was used to screen cancer in healthy people? Thus, Dr. Lo once again led the research team to apply such techniques to organ-graft rejection testing and cancer diagnosis. "We hope that ultimately we can develop a blood test, similar to non-invasive prenatal testing, that can diagnose multiple types of cancer," said Dr. Dennis Lo.