Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1997

New Asia - Yale Student Exchange SevenNew Asia students flew to Connecticut in the United States on 1st February 1997 for a two-week visit under the fourth New Asia - Yale Student Exchange Programme. This year's theme was migration, and the students delivered four papers on issues pertaining to migration in Hong Kong at a symposium at Yale University: new immigrants from China, emigration of Hong Kong people, Vietnamese refugee problems, and the role of early Chinese migrants in Hong Kong's economic development. To better understand migration issues in America, the students attended seminars and talked w i t h officials from the US Immigration Department as well as recent migrants to the US. They also visited New York City and Washington, DC. The visit was reciprocated from 9th to 22nd March, when Yale students and staff visited New Asia, presented papers on migration problems in the US, and paid a two-day visit to Guangzhou. Med i cal News Breakthrough in Diagnosis and Treatment of Liver Cancer The Liver Cancer Study Group of the Faculty of Medicine has succeeded in establishing a new diagnostic blood test for early primary liver cancer. Liver cancer is very difficul t to cure because there is no accurate method for early diagnosis and the disease is resistant to cancer drugs. The standard test for primary liver cancer is a blood test measuring serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP). The higher the level of AFP, the more likely that the patient has cancer. The test's accuracy however decreases when AFP is at a low though abnormal level. What makes diagnosis more difficult is that germ cell tumour, chronic liver disease, or pregnancy can also result in an abnormal level of AFP. Researchers at the Faculty of Medicine have successfully used isoelectric focusing to delineate different types of AFP. By reading the different bands created by subjecting serumAFPs to astron g electric field, doctors can now accurately diagnose the clinical condition. This method helps to diagnose liver cancer at an early stage, and hence increases the chances of cure. There has also been a great leap forward in the treatment of liver cancer. Selective internal radiation therapy, introduced by staff of the medical faculty in 1990, has now been perfected w i t h the establishment of a mathematical partition model to predict the dose of radiation received by tumourous and non-tumourous areas. By using 43 Tc-labelled macroaggregated albumin and gamma scan, the actual treatment of selective internal radiation can be simulated. Then, by analysing with the mathematical partition model, the appropriate patients can be selected for treatment. This new method is Isoelectric f o c u s i n g of A F P: The development of A F P bands over310 days in serum samplestakenf r om a liver cancer p a t i e n t News in Brief 49