Giant of Cancer Care

Prof. Tony Mok, chairman of the Department of Clinical Oncology and Li Shu Fan Medical Foundation Professor of Clinical Oncology of the Faculty of Medicine, has been named a Giant of Cancer Care 2020 by OncLive®, a leading multimedia cancer resource in the US, in recognition of his clinical research on oncogene driven lung cancer and the application of immunotherapy which has shifted the treatment paradigm and defined the current management of lung cancer. Professor Mok is the first and only scholar from an Asian institution being listed.

Professor Mok said, ‘I am most grateful and humbled to be inducted into the 2020 class of Giants of Cancer Care® with some of the world’s most eminent oncologists. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all my local and global collaborators for their selfless support over the years. From precision medicine to immunotherapy, and most recently the exploration of CRISPR technology in treating the disease, together we overcame many hurdles and succeeded in advancing lung cancer care. We shall never stop our war against lung cancer.’

In the past, the only treatment for advanced lung cancer was chemotherapy, and the median survival time was less than a year. Professor Mok’s study proved that molecular targeted therapy is superior to conventional intravenous chemotherapy in lung cancer patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation and who are ALK-positive, thereby establishing for the first time targeted therapy as the first-line treatment. Currently, doctors will check for EGFR or ALK mutation before prescribing a customized treatment plan. This puts personalized medicine into practice. Now selective patients with driver oncogenes may survive beyond three to five years.