How One Research Protocol Helped Test 12,000+ Individuals

Co-authored with Nobel Laureate Prof. Barry J. Marshall, Prof. Wang published a peer-reviewed JoVE video article demonstrating the H. pylori string test and qPCR workflow for diagnosis and antibiotic resistance profiling.

This method addresses a critical health crisis: a 2025 Nature Medicine study estimated that 15.6 million gastric cancer cases could occur in people born between 2008 and 2017, with about 76% linked to H. pylori infection.¹  

Let’s break Prof. Wang’s success into practical steps you can use to standardize and scale methods in your own lab.

• ▪️ Text-heavy protocols often fail to convey every detail. Prof. Wang’s team used video to capture the precise collection and qPCR steps easily misinterpreted in writing. This was critical for a historically operator-dependent workflow.

• ▪️ The study used a non-invasive method that avoided endoscopy, sedation, or biopsy, with results in under 4 hours. This made it much easier to implement in diverse clinical settings and support patient testing at scale.

• ▪️ Instead of hours or days of in-person workshops, each center used the JoVE video as their primary training tool. Medical staff and laboratory technicians could pause, rewind, and replay as needed, reducing local variation.

• ▪️ Prof. Wang’s workflow didn’t stop at detection. It also identified antibiotic resistance mutations, providing data that directly support treatment decisions and national surveillance.

• ▪️ A method’s success is measured by its consistency across variables. Prof. Wang’s protocol was robust across 52 centers, 26 provinces, and 12,902 individuals, with results later published in The Lancet Microbe.²

Prof. Wang helped make a complex diagnostic method practical at a national level.

This study shows what happens when research is demonstrated clearly and used in the same way across sites. Training gets faster. Multicenter studies become more repeatable. Useful clinical data is generated at scale.

 Explore how publishing visual protocols helps standardize complex methods across sites.

1. Park, JY, Georges, D, Alberts, CJ, et al. (2025). Global lifetime estimates of expected and preventable gastric cancers across 185 countries. Nature Medicine, 31, 3020-3027. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-03793-6
   
2. Wang L, Li Z, Tay C, et al. (2024). Multicentre, cross-sectional surveillance of Helicobacter pylori prevalence and antibiotic resistance to clarithromycin and levofloxacin in urban China using the string test coupled with quantitative PCR. The Lancet Microbe, 5, e512-e513. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2666-5247(24)00027-2