The HPB discipline has vast experiences in conducting multicentre clinical trials and has spearheaded numerous investigator-initiated multicentre HCC clinical trials through the Program in Translational and Clinical Liver Cancer Research in NCCS led by Professor Pierce Chow. Nested within the program is the Secretariat of the Asia-Pacific Hepatocellular Carcinoma (AHCC) Trials Group which has completed 8 prospective, multi-centre clinical studies in HCC that has involved over 50 participating centres in 17 different countries and enrolled more than 3,000 patients. . The Group recently concluded the enrolment of a 2,500-patient from 33 sites, collecting real world data for the Asia-Pacific HCC Registry (AHCC08). Currently, the Group has begun recruitment for a prospective, cohort study involving 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). New clinical studies are in the pipeline and the group has established strong alliances with industries and pharmaceutical companies.

  

The Program also coordinates translational research platforms like the NMRC Flagship Translational and Clinical Research Program in Liver Cancer (AHCC07 PLANET) to conduct the world’s first prospective multi-national, multi-omics (genomics, immunomics, metabolomics) study in a surgically resected HCC cohort, the multi-institutional PuRPOSE Program to develop a patient-specific diagnostic and predictive platform to improve efficacy of HCC treatment. Most recently, the creation of a radiogenomics platform to accurately detect liver lesions and predict genomic driver mutations through standard-of-care imaging and AI-based predictive and diagnostic algorithms. 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.