Yonsei Cancer Center's Lung Cancer Center team has earned the prestigious title of Asia's best multidisciplinary team during the World Conference on Lung Cancer 2023 (WCLC 2023), held in Singapore from last Saturday to Tuesday. This achievement marks a significant milestone, as it is the first time a Korean institution has received such a distinguished honor.

The WCLC started awarding the "Cancer Care Team Award" in 2017, aiming to share outstanding lung cancer treatment outcomes worldwide.

This award acknowledges excellence not only in the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer but also in the holistic approach encompassing clinical research and patient education.

Teams from four regions - North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world - are rigorously evaluated, with patients directly recommending teams. Only one team is selected per region, making the competition fierce.

Diagnosing lung cancer in its early stages remains a challenging task since the lungs lack pain receptors. Approximately 60 percent of patients are diagnosed in the advanced stage when cancer has already spread throughout the lung. Moreover, lung cancer cells can easily metastasize between lung tissues, further complicating treatment.

Adding to the challenge, the exact causes of lung cancer remain somewhat elusive, and treatments can vary based on genetic mutations. This underscores the vital need for a multidisciplinary approach to treatment.

The Lung Cancer Team at Yonsei Cancer Center comprises specialists from seven departments, including oncology, thoracic surgery, radiation oncology, nuclear medicine, pathology, and respiratory medicine.

Once respiratory medicine, radiology, pathology, and nuclear medicine teams determine the type and presence of lung cancer, specialists from oncology, thoracic surgery, and radiation oncology customize treatments for each patient, taking into consideration factors like gender, age, underlying conditions, genetic background, and the stage and type of cancer.

Some recent clinical trial successes of Yonsei Cancer Center's lung cancer team include the involvement of the approval of lazertinib from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety as a first-line treatment for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations, and the rapid approval by of librivant for NSCLC with EGFR exon20 mutations from the U.S. FDA, and research on repotrectinib for ROS1-positive NSCLC.

The team stressed that these achievements were thanks to the vast patient pool available for clinical trials, cutting-edge facility infrastructure, years of accumulated expertise, and a strong research team of approximately 100 professionals.

"The five-year survival rate for lung cancer has tripled over the past 30 years, yet it still hovers around 36.8 percent," said Professor Cho Byoung-chul, chief of Lung Cancer Center  at Yonsei Cancer Center. "We are determined to accelerate our efforts in treatment and research to shift the paradigm from lung cancer being an incurable disease to one that can be fully cured."