By Dr Chun Tang — MBChB (Manchester), MRCGP, MBA · Practising NHS & Private GP · Founder, Little Ox

Dr Tang in The Telegraph: The Bowel Cancer Test Story — Why Preventative Medicine Changes Everything

In January 2022, The Telegraph published a feature about me and my work developing the ColoAlert early-detection bowel cancer test in the UK — under the headline "The doctor who launched a super accurate bowel cancer test in the UK after losing his dad to the disease."

I don't often speak publicly about my father's death — but it is the most direct explanation for why I do what I do, and why preventative medicine is not an abstract clinical philosophy for me but something personal.

The Story Behind the Test

My father died of bowel cancer. Bowel cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in the UK — around 16,000 people die from it each year — and yet it is one of the most survivable cancers when caught early. The five-year survival rate for stage 1 bowel cancer is over 90%. For stage 4, it falls below 10%. The difference between those two numbers is detection.

The NHS bowel cancer screening programme uses a faecal immunochemical test (FIT) that detects blood in stool. It is a good test. But ColoAlert goes further — it's a stool DNA test that detects multiple biomarkers of colorectal cancer and advanced adenomas, with significantly higher sensitivity than FIT alone. My goal in bringing it to the UK through Biox Medical was to make a more accurate test accessible without waiting for a GP referral or NHS screening eligibility.

The experience of watching my father's cancer be detected too late is what drives my conviction that healthcare should be proactive, not reactive. You should not wait to become ill before engaging with the health system. Detection early, lifestyle optimisation early, supplementation early — these are the principles that inform everything I do, including Little Ox.

The NAD+ Connection to Cancer Prevention

I want to be very careful here — NMN is not a cancer treatment and I would never suggest it is. But the NAD+/sirtuin biology is directly relevant to cancer prevention in a way that deserves honest explanation.

DNA damage and impaired DNA repair are central to cancer development. Every day, your cells accumulate thousands of DNA lesions from oxidative stress, UV exposure, replication errors and environmental toxins. The efficiency of your DNA repair systems — particularly the PARP enzymes, which are NAD+-dependent — determines whether those lesions are corrected or allowed to accumulate into the mutations that drive cancer.

NAD+ depletion after 40 compromises PARP function and therefore DNA repair efficiency. This is one of the biological mechanisms by which cancer risk increases with age. Restoring NAD+ through NMN Pure supports the cellular machinery of DNA repair — not as a cancer drug, but as maintenance of the cellular infrastructure that your body needs to correct daily genetic damage before it accumulates.

Preventative health is the philosophy behind everything at Little Ox. Not treating disease — supporting the biology that prevents it.

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