Cancer Precision Medicine in China

Cancer, as a global health issue, has been attracting increasing attention from scientists, medical professionals, as well as the general population. During the past several decades, many therapeutic approaches, including surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy, have come into play for cancer treatment. Nonetheless, many of these treatments are not personalized according to the specific situation or genetic context of a particular patient. Nowadays, precision medicine, defined by President Obama as ‘‘delivering the right treatments at the right time—every time—to the right person”, opens a new era of cancer research with the hope to provide personalized treatment for different patients. To foster the knowledge share and promote potential collaboration on cancer precision medicine domestically and internationally, the first International Conference on Cancer Precision Medicine (IConCPM) took place on September 22–24, 2016 in Tianjin, China. The conference was hosted by the National Clinical Research Center for Cancer (NCRCC), Chinese Anti-Cancer Association (CACA), China Medicinal Biotechnology Association (CMBA), Medical and Health Engineering Division of Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, as well as the National Foundation of Cancer Research (NFCR). IConCPM was initiated by Prof. Xishan Hao, CAE academician from NCRCC and Prof. Raju Kucherlapati, member of the National Academy of Science of the United States (US) from Harvard Medical School. As the conference chair, Prof. Hao, together with co-chair Prof. Kucherlapati, delivered a warm welcome speech. More than 300 people from all over the world attended this conference and 23 talks were presented at this meeting, focused on precision medicine in China. Then Prof. Ping Wang, President of Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, and Zhaofeng Zhang, Director, Division of Biotechnology and Medicine, Department of Science and Technology for Social Development, Ministry of Science and Technology of China, also gave their brief remarks for welcome. The conference was preceded by a next-generation sequencing (NGS) and bioinformatics analysis workshop on Sept 22, covering topics from DNA/RNA extraction to sequencing data analysis. In this report, we provided a short introduction on the talks and briefly recapitulated each one of them referring to related publications whenever possible. At the end, we summarize this report with a few comments on the success of IConCPM.