Annual Report 2020
Preface
With the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19, most of the hospitals were interfered for daily healthcare services. In the National Cancer Center Hospital East (NCCHE), normal cancer patient care have been done during the period due to function sharing and regional cooperation with local governments of Chiba prefecture and Kashiwa city. While the number of outpatients remarkably decreased in early FY2020 with the outbreak, it was soon recovered to average levels.
The NCCHE recorded 9,494 new referrals (including second opinion cases), 402.9 for the average number of inpatients/day with 103.2% bed occupation rate, an average of 1,223 outpatients, and a total of 4,213 surgeries and 202 iv treatments/day in FY2020, maintaining high records as seen in recent years, with the highest record of surgery in particular. The number of robot-assisted surgeries has remarkably increased with 362 surgeries mainly due to an increase of urogenital surgery. The number of patients receiving ambulatory iv treatment is increasing, while the number of patients receiving proton therapy was decreased due to COVID-19 pandemic outbreak with a significant decrease of patients from overseas. In regard to patient care, “medical concierge office” was launched in FY2020. The NCCHE contracted the comprehensive medical cooperation with Tsuruoka Municipal Shonai Hospital in Yamagata prefecture and started some telemedicine cooperation with ICT devices. These developments will be followed by implementation of monitoring patients in a hotel on the premises for new referrals from remote areas, with launch planned for 2022.
In regard to research activities, various academia-industry collaborations for device developments have been achieved. A start-up company from the NCC developed a new surgery-assisting robot which is now under submission for regulatory approval and the start-up was successfully merged by a major device manufacturer. The NCCHE also establishes a system to capture images during surgery from core hospitals nationwide, enabling them to be used in industry development (S-access Japan). This capturing system is being applied for AI navigation surgery and digital transformation in various fields. The clinical/TR support office has been intensively organized in collaboration with “The Exploratory Oncology Research & Clinical Trial Center (EPOC)”, which enables the undertaking of various clinical/translational researches including many investigator-initiated registration trials counted as top level in Japan. With these efforts, the number of publications are increasing year by year in association with many publications as first-authors in the top journals such as NEJM, the Lancet Oncology, and Nature Medicine. The nationwide genome screening consortium (SCRUM-Japan) introduced a cutting-edge liquid biopsy panel. More than 20,000 patients have already been enrolled for this program aiming to genotype-match new agent trials, resulting in 11 regulatory approvals for new agents. SCRUM-Asia was launched in 2018 and has already integrated more than 10,000 clinical-genome dataset of East Asian lung cancer patients. Another research with international collaboration achieved an international standardization of new disease entity and diagnostic criteria in HER2 positive colorectal cancer. For immuno-oncology research programs, various academia-industry collaboration studies are also underway in collaboration with EPOC investigators. Various combination studies with immune checkpoint inhibitors were conducted in which some combinations achieved highly promising efficacy followed by global randomized trials led by several investigators in the NCCHE. The NCCHE/EPOC are planning to have more intensive academia-industry collaborations including regenerative medicine in new research building adjacent to the hospital premises which will be launched in 2021.
Atsushi Ohtsu, M.D., Ph.D.
Director
National Cancer Center Hospital East