Greetings from the President

Founded as a hub for cancer treatment and research by the central government in 1962, the National Cancer Center has since lead the field. The Center was designated an Incorporated Administrative Agency in April 2010, then subsequently a National Research and Development Agency in April 2015, with a renewed commission to explore and address issues, complementing academia and the private sector. To serve as a nucleus of clinical research and development, the Hospital (Tsukiji Campus) and the Hospital East (Kashiwa Campus) were designated as core hospitals for clinical research respectively in August and September of 2015, since then leading world class clinical research and investigator-initiated trials. It is essential to control cancer with both basic research and treatment, and it is our duty to form strategies and present to the nation and to the Japanese people.

Currently, one in every two Japanese citizens will develop cancer in their lifetime. Nearly one million people are newly diagnosed with cancer every year; and as the population is aging, we expect cancer patient numbers to build up. The mission of the National Cancer Center is not only to provide the best possible care including genomic medicine to each individual cancer patient, based on genomic and other clinical and biological information, but also to prevent the onset of cancer by identifying highrisk groups, developing and implementing effective prevention measures. In other words, we are to establish, practice and promote precision medicine tailored to individual patients. To achieve these objectives, it is essential to elucidate traits and diversity of cancer in individuals with integrated omics research including genomic analysis, and to develop optimal individual treatment and prevention methods. Developing an understanding of localized immune response in tumor tissue is also urgently called for.

The following has been our recent focus, in implementing the national Comprehensive 10-year Strategy for Cancer Control, in action from 2014, under the slogan “towards complete recovery from, prevention against, and dealing with cancer”:

• Reinforcing research and clinical systems to address unmet medical needs
• Developing a framework to provide optimized treatment and preemptive medical care for individual patients, based on genomic information

Following the revolutionary leap in genome sequencing technology, our nation is building the infrastructure to implement cancer genomic medicine into our national healthcare system. Our hospitals on both Tsukiji and Kashiwa campuses were designated as core hospitals for cancer genomic medicine in March 2018. It is imperative that we work with cancer genomic medicine cooperative hospitals across the nation, to ensure the delivery and quality of the new services, by sharing knowledge and nurturing specialists.

Experts at our two campuses are to integrate our insight and experience to advocate new cancer control strategies and policies. Collaboration with industrial and academic research institutions, to realize effective control over cancer is indispensable. The wishes and hopes of the Japanese citizens, including cancer patients and their families, need to be addressed, towards providing solutions. I, as President, wish to develop and reinforce a system for providing medical care that will allow all cancer patients and their families to keep their hopes alive.

Hitoshi Nakagama, M.D., D.M.Sc.

President

National Cancer Center