Taipei Medical University (TMU) and National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) yesterday announced two research breakthroughs related to precision medical care of liver cancer and chronic kidney disease.
They said at a news conference that they have been collaborating on several projects on precision medical care for liver cancer and kidney diseases, citing that there are more than 90,000 people who are on dialysis in Taiwan.
NTUH superintendent Wu Ming-shiang (吳明賢) said the two hospitals have strong research capacity, so their collaboration can achieve highly effective results.
Photo: Chiu Chih-jou, Taipei Times
That many of the studies were conducted by interdisciplinary or even multinational medical teams shows the strength of Taiwan’s precision medicine to the world, Wu said.
Taiwan historically had a high prevalence of hepatitis B, with carrier rates reaching about one-fifth of the population and many affected by the “hepatitis-cirrhosis-liver cancer” disease progression, NTUH Department of Internal Medicine attending physician Tsai Feng-chiao (蔡丰喬) said.
While vaccination and increased early screening have reduced virus-induced liver cancer cases, metabolic disorders and fatty liver disease continue to pose a serious health threat, Tsai said.
As effective treatment options are limited, some medical teams are looking to develop personalized diagnostic and therapeutic strategies based on a person’s cancer etiology, he said.
Tsai said their team, led by NTUH vice superintendent Kao Jia-horng (高嘉宏) and in partnership with TMU, employed multiomics techniques to investigate variations in the genome, transcriptome and kinome across liver cancer patients.
Their findings explained tumor heterogeneity and its implications for disease progression and treatment response, NTUH said.
Meanwhile, NTUH hepatologist Su Tung-hung (蘇東弘) analyzed a large hepatitis B patient database to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with virus-induced liver cancer, the hospital said.
TMU assistant professor Chang Ching-wen researched how immune microenvironments surrounding tumor cells influence cancer growth and therapeutic outcomes through integrative genomic and transcriptomic profiling, it said.
The joint effort has led to the creation of a comprehensive liver cancer tumor database, which could accelerate the identification of personalized biomarkers and support the realization of precision liver cancer care, it said.
Furthermore, through high-throughput experiments and artificial intelligence analysis, the team developed a “gene interference plus drug inhibition” platform and identified two promising combination therapies which were validated using TMU clinical patient data, it said.
Although the discoveries are not ready for clinical application, they mark major milestones in cancer therapy research, it added.
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