BACKGROUND FOR PUBLIC

Brain tumor is a very heterogenous group of tumors. Unlike other common cancers, it is at least 20-30 tumors even for the common types. The complete list of brain tumors as outlined by World Health Organization 2016 is much longer.

Brain tumor is an extremely deadly tumor. The commonest adult brain tumor, glioblastoma, is almost universally fatal and has a median survival of only 14-16 months even with the standard-of-care treatment. This is much worse than other common cancers nowadays. And in spite of enormous understanding of the biology of glioblastoma, there has been relatively little progress in terms of prolonging patient survival, not to mention cure.

Brain tumor is also the commonest solid cancer in children. Like many pediatric cancers, great strides were made in the treatment but survival improvement has stalled in the last thirty years. Yet there have been great advances in the understanding of the biology of medulloblastomas and other pediatric brain tumors.

Pediatric brain tumors are also unusual in that there are many small groups of rare tumors that even the best centres in the world do not have enough cases for good studies. So collaboration is a must to study these rare pediatric brain cancers. In Asia, germ cell tumor is also well known to be much commoner than in the west.

Meningiomas are another group of common brain tumor. Meningiomas do not usually cause death shortly but 5-10% of cases, in spite of the best surgical operations, will recur and multiple recurrences eventually cause great morbidity or death. There is no standard-of-care chemotherapy regimen for meningiomas.

The group of researchers of HSBC working in Shanghai and Hong Kong have great passion in helping patients with this group of terrible diseases. While we may not be publishing in Science or Nature, we do excellent research work comparable to many good international clinical centres. We have clinical and laboratory infrastructures comparing to many international clinical centres too. See click here click here

While the researchers of HSBC have their own national grants, we work closely with charities and industries who play very important roles in combating this group of diseases. If you are interested in sponsoring our work, please write us anytime ( hkng@cuhk.edu.hk ).

  OUR WORK