Download new insights, opportunities, and prospects for a cure

Annals of Oncology 26 (Supplement 7): vii6, 2015
doi:10.1093/annonc/mdv402.2
ESMO/JSMO joint symposium: Immune
checkpoint blockade in cancer therapy:
new insights, opportunities, and
prospects for a cure
AOJ
2
Trends of multinational clinical trial in Asia-Oceania: the
role of Korea in full blooming spring season
Hyun C. Chung
Yonsei Cancer Center, Yonsei University College of Medicine
abstracts
Asia has recently entered into a full blooming spring season in multinational clinical
trials. The trend of globalization was observed in increment of focus on Asia from
industry-initiated global trials. Asia contributed 18% of global trials and 6% of trials
sites. The most densely populated continent with more than 4,000 million people and
rapid expansion of the pharmaceutical market are the fertile ground of this blooming.
Large number of patients, market potential, cost-effectiveness, good quality of
infrastructure and standardization of data are nutrient factors.
However, there are still challenges to overcome in hardware. As Asia is an extremely
divergent continent, several issues are being raised as difficulties in collaboration such
as differences in language, standard treatment or guidelines, practice pattern, and
regulation. In software, there are differences in disease epidemiology, molecular
epidemiology, molecular pharmacology, and life expectancy.
For the last 10 years, the infrastructure of clinical trial in Korea has been developed
unbelievably, and got attention from many global pharmaceutical companies. The
main reasons were high enrollment speed from increased awareness of clinical trial by
the public, good data quality from well-motivated and trained investigators, modern
technology (electronic medical record, PACS, e-IRB), huge patient pool from big
cancer centers treated by standardized guideline, high quality infrastructure for the
translational research, and short study start-up timelines. But Korea still lacks R&D
capacity and new drug pipelines, government support for the investigator-initiated
trials, and global networking. By devoting strong points of Korea to the Asian trials and
getting help from Asian countries for the weak point of Korea, Korea will be an active
member of Asian multinational trials for the Asian cancer patients and for establishing
Asian leadership in global trials.
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society for Medical Oncology.
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