National Cancer Center Hospital
The National Cancer Center Hospital is Japan's national cancer centre and the leading site for Daiichi Sankyo's DXd ADC trials.
NCC Tokyo and NCC East (Kashiwa, #37) run Japan's largest phase 1 programme, SCRUM-Japan genomic screening, and led early T-DXd, Dato-DXd, and HER3-DXd studies.
- Phase 1 ADC trials
- SCRUM-Japan
- Proton therapy (East)
Built the data centre behind the Japan Clinical Oncology Group, the country's main academic trials network.
Leads Japan's national cancer centre, the hub of the country's genomic medicine and early-phase trial programmes.
A breast and gynaecologic oncologist deeply involved in the early trastuzumab deruxtecan studies and in Japanese ADC development.
Principal investigator of SPOTLIGHT and DESTINY-Gastric01, two trials that created new drug classes for stomach cancer.
Leads thoracic oncology at NCC East and the LC-SCRUM-Japan network that connects rare-driver lung cancer patients to trials.
Runs Japan's largest first-in-human oncology unit, where many Daiichi Sankyo DXd ADCs were first given to patients.
Genomics leader behind LC-SCRUM-Japan, the nationwide screening network that finds rare lung cancer drivers for trials.
Leads CIRCULATE-Japan, the largest ctDNA-guided adjuvant programme in colorectal cancer, and the PARADIGM and SCRUM-Japan GI efforts.
Led the first-in-human study of trastuzumab deruxtecan and runs one of Asia's most productive phase 1 units.
Thoracic oncologist who leads NCC Hospital in Tokyo and has been a Japanese principal investigator on a generation of lung cancer trials.
The blood test stratifies risk far better than stage or pathology. It supports treating ctDNA-positive patients and suggests ctDNA-negative patients gain little from chemotherapy, but because treatment was not randomised the de-escalation claim needs the randomised trials that are now under way.
Patients with newly diagnosed advanced stomach cancer should now have Claudin 18.2 tested alongside HER2, PD-L1 and mismatch repair, because roughly a third will be eligible for zolbetuximab, which adds about three months of median survival. The main practical problem is nausea and vomiting during infusions, which needs aggressive prophylaxis. How to sequence or combine it with immunotherapy in PD-L1-positive tumours is unresolved.