Professor TANG Shaotao and his team has been laboring in the field of biliary atresia for 15 years, and established for the first time in the world the threshold criteria for the molecular diagnosis of biliary atresia serum matrix metalloproteinase-7 (MMP-7), which can increase the sensitivity of biliary atresia diagnosis to 98.67% and the specificity to 95% by a single drop of blood, and the whole testing only takes 4 hours, with costs reduced to about RMB 1000 yuan. The minimum age of diagnosis was advanced to 3 weeks or even earlier. This result is expected to bring a great change in the clinical diagnosis of biliary atresia.

       The results were published in 2018 in the Journal of Hepatology (IF: 18.946), an internationally renowned magazine.