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Oncology meet addresses lung cancer threat

"In time, we even hope to tailor treatment to individual patients according to their genetic characteristics."

Yang Pan-chyr, head of internal medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital

The hot topic of yesterday's annual meeting of the Taiwan Cooperative Oncology Group was lung cancer, which has recently surpassed liver cancer as the country's most prevalent and deadliest cancer.

Unlike in many other countries where lung cancer is strongly associated with smoking, in Taiwan many non-smokers develop adenocarcinoma of the lungs due to genetic factors that are not completely understood.

"Lung cancer is the most common cancer among Taiwanese women," said Wu Cheng-wen (吳成文) the director of National Health Research Institutes, "yet only 7 percent of women in Taiwan are smokers."

Wu said Taiwanese surgeons, internists, laboratory researchers, public health experts and epidemiologists must come together to fight Taiwan's deadliest cancer.

"We have a good team; we need to do our own research," he added.

"We used to rely on research data and care procedures from abroad too much," said National Taiwan University Hospital internal medicine chief Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池). "But recent local research has revealed many important differences between Taiwanese lung cancer patients compared with patients from other countries."

"In time, we even hope to tailor treatment to individual patients according to their genetic characteristics," he added.

Huang Hsiu-feng (黃秀芬), a pathology researcher with the National Health Research Institute, recently discovered that the drug gefitinib, which has been rejected as an ineffective drug in the US, had dramatic effects when it comes to shrinking the size of tumors in Taiwanese patients due to the high incidence of a genetic mutation among the Taiwanese population.

"Now we must come up with an effective filter to select the patients who will benefit most from gefitinib," Huang said. "This way the National Health Insurance scheme will be more willing pay for this expensive treatment."

Chen Chih-yi (陳志毅), president of the Taiwan Lung Cancer Society, said that advances in surgical procedures have made lung tumor removal safer and easier than ever, and patients and physicians should err on the side of removing a tumor even when they are not completely sure that it is malignant.

"Auto-suture devices and thoracoscopy have made open chest operations quicker and safer," he added. "The rate of deaths from complications are low -- 0.5 to 1 percent."
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