Molecular diagnosis in China: present status and challenges ahead

Molecular diagnosis is rapidly developed in recent years, mainly applicated in the diagnosis of hereditary disease, infectious pathogens, tumor susceptibility and molecular typing, companion diagnosis and prognosis assessment, playing more and more important role in many diseases diagnosis and treatment. Molecular diagnosis was developed from the eighties of the last century in our country. Nowadays, the mainly applied technologies in the clinical laboratory include fluorescence in situ hybridization, quantitative PCR, microarray and DNA sequencing. These molecular technologies make up for the insufficiency of routine testing and take up a central role in the development of modern laboratory medicine. With the continuous development in transformation research of molecular technology recent years, there will be more molecular diagnostic techniques applied in clinicaldiagnosis in the future. But it still exists some drawbacks in the performance of molecular diagnosis in our country according to the current situation, such as imbalanced regional development, mismatched policies, non-standardized laboratory construction, deficiency of quality control and supervision, etc., which requires the joint effort of the government, hospital, professional association and clinical laboratory itself to promote the healthy and orderly development of molecular diagnosis.(Chin J Lab Med, 2016, 39: 473-476) Key words: Molecular diagnosis technology; Clinical laboratory techniques; Medical laboratory science