ABOUT US

Asia is composed of about 50 countries whose levels of the gross domestic product (GDP) per person are diverse and ranging from low- to high-income countries.

In high-income countries (HICs) in Asia like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, UAE and Taiwan, the cure rate of pediatric cancers is nearly 80%, while that in low- and lower-middle income countries (LMICs) in Asia is still from 0 to 30%.

The causes of such poor outcome in LMICs include failure in establishing diagnose, misdiagnosis, abandonment of therapy, treatment-related death, and high relapse rate.

In 2018, World Health Organization (WHO) declared that this kind of inequality should not be present, and that the cure rate of childhood cancer on earth should be increased up to more than 60% by 2030, which is named as “WHO Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer (GICC)” .

The initial founders of International Society of Pediatric Oncology (SIOP) decided to form Pediatric Oncology Club in 1967 and the first SIOP meeting was held in 1969 in Madrid, Spain.There were 28 founding members and they forest up the constitution.

SIOP has six continental branches, Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and South America, among which Asia is the largest and accounts for more than 60% of world population.

However, since either SIOP or SIOP Asia is an academic society, we needed an execution arm or an action team to conduct clinical studies and implement changes in standard of care for increasing the cure rate as well as improving the care of children and adolescents/young adults (AYAs) with cancer in Asia.

That was the Asian Pediatric Hematology and Oncology Group (APHOG) we pursued.

Thus, APHOG and SIOP Asia work together like a “two wheels of a cart”, a Chinese proverb, for better cure and more care.