National Yang-Ming University and Taipei Veterans General Hospital yesterday announced that the National Cancer Institute, the US government’s lead agency for cancer research, has established a laboratory in Taiwan and is to begin a five-year collaborative research project focusing on lung cancer.
National Yang-Ming University vice president and Cancer Progression Research Center director Yang Muh-hwa (楊慕華) said lung cancer ranked No. 1 in the top 10 causes of cancer in Taiwan in 2016, claiming approximately 9,000 lives each year, and that it is also among the deadliest cancers in the US, making it a shared enemy of both nations.
While lung adenocarcinoma is the most common type of lung cancer in Taiwan and the US, there are differences in genetic mutations among patients in the two nations, he said, adding that a larger proportion of Taiwanese patients were found to have an epidermal growth factor receptor gene mutation.
Photo: CNA
Identification of the genetic mutations driving lung cancer is important for doctors to decide the cancer treatment strategy and targeted therapy, Yang said.
Nina Solarz, the wife of late US representative Stephen Solarz, who proposed bills in support of Taiwan and visited Taiwan several times, has established a memorial fund at the Foundation for the US National Institutes of Health in her husband’s memory to support cancer research, the university and hospital said.
The fund has supported the establishment of the new research laboratory in Taiwan, they said.
The five-year collaborative research project is to focus on the ethnic differences of the lung cancer genome and epigenetics in lung cancer diagnosis and therapy, as well as research on immunotherapy and stem cells.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching