The multi-disciplinary Comprehensive Liver Cancer Clinic (CLCC) at NCCS is a joint service clinic comprising HPB surgeons, medical oncologists, radiation oncologist, nuclear medicine physicians, interventional radiologists, oncologic diagnostic radiologists, pathologists and nurse practitioners. The CLCC manages the whole spectrum of patients with HPB malignancies and live multi-disciplinary case discussions are conducted twice a week at the same clinic day when the patients are seen. This facilitates multi-disciplinary management of the patients. The multi-disciplinary CLCC team also drives cutting-edge translational and clinical studies that aim to interrogate the molecular and mechanistic basis of liver cancer, improve patient diagnosis and outcomes and develop novel therapies for HPB diseases by bringing discoveries from the bench to the bedside that can be translated to the next efficacious therapy.
Clinician-scientists at the CLCC have vast experience in conducting multicentre clinical studies and has spearheaded numerous investigator-initiated multicentre hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) clinical trials through the Program in Translational and Clinical Liver Cancer Research in NCCS (PI Prof Pierce Chow) and also in the Virus-Induced Cancers Translational Oncology and immunologY (VICTORY) program (PI Prof Toh Han Chong). Nested within the program is the Secretariat of the Asia-Pacific Hepatocellular Carcinoma (AHCC) Trials Group which has led more than 10 prospective, multi-centre clinical studies in HCC that have involved over 50 participating centres in 17 different countries and enrolled more than 4,000 patients. The Group is has in 2021 launched a prospective, cohort study of 2,000 patients at high risk for HCC and a parallel cohort of 100 HCC patients across 6 specialist centres/hospitals and 8 polyclinics in Singapore (AHCC10 ELEGANCE and AHCC11 PROSECT). The Group is also conducting an investigator-initiated multi-national randomized phase II trial involving up to 13 sites in the Asia-Pacific (AHCC09 STRATUM)New clinical studies are in the pipeline and the group has established strong alliances with industries and pharmaceutical companies like Genentech, Chugai, Engine Biosciences, MIRXES, Perspectum, AMILI, SIRTEX and Roche.
The Program also coordinates translational research platforms like the NMRC Flagship Translational and Clinical Research Program in Liver Cancer (AHCC07 PLANET) and the Singapore Liver Cancer Consortium (SLCC) to conduct the world’s first prospective multi-national, multi-omics (genomics, immunomics, metabolomics) study in a surgically resected HCC cohort. This country-wide consortium is supported by various adjunct grants including the BMRC IAF-PP Grant (2017), NMRC CSA Grant (2018), NMRC CS-IRG Grant (2019) and the NHIC I2Start Grant (2020). The enterprise has also published in various high-impact journals such as Cell, National Science Review, Hepatology and Nature Communications. In 2022, the NMRC TCR Grant was successfully renewed with the NMRC OF-LCG Grant with a grant quantum of $25 million for the conduct of PLANET 2.0, which leverages on two investigator initiated therapeutic clinical trials (already supported by industry) with best-in-class therapies to conduct in-vitro and in-vivo mechanistic studies to uncover predictive biomarkers that can guide therapy selection, including response and resistance to therapy. We collaborate closely with leading research institutes, including the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS), the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), Singapore Phenome Centre (SPC), the Translational Immunology Institute (TII), Duke-NUS, Cancer Science Institute (CSI) and the Dept. of Biological Science, NUS, Singapore Bioimaging Consortium (SBIC), the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and Samsung Medical Center, South Korea. These multi-institutional collaborations bring together different world-class scientific expertise to bear on the challenges of HCC.
More information on the AHCC Trials Group and all current/completed studies can be found here.
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