Editor’s Note The 2025 Yat-sen Breast Cancer Conference, held in conjunction with the 2025 CSCO BC Southern Forum, the Second National Conference on the Release of the Chinese Expert Consensus on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Young Breast Cancer, and the Fourth Yat-sen Breast Nursing Conference, took place in Guangzhou from December 26 to 27, 2025. The meeting focused on the standardization of breast cancer care, the evolution of cutting-edge treatment strategies, and the precision management of young breast cancer populations, systematically presenting the latest advances and future directions in the field. During the conference, Oncology Frontier invited Professor Qiang Liu, Conference Chair and senior leader at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, to introduce the highlights of the meeting and the rationale behind its multidimensional, integrative academic design, and to share his reflections on the development of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in China based on the five-year achievements and strategic planning of the Yat-sen Breast Tumor Hospital.
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Oncology Frontier: This conference integrates multiple components, including the 2025 Yat-sen Breast Cancer Conference, the 2025 CSCO BC Southern Forum and Second National Conference on the Release of the Chinese Expert Consensus on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Young Breast Cancer, and the Fourth Yat-sen Breast Nursing Conference. As Conference Chair, could you introduce the key highlights of the meeting? What expectations for the development of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in China are reflected in this multidimensional, integrated conference design?
Professor Qiang Liu: The Yat-sen Breast Cancer Conference was held on the final weekend of 2025. The meeting serves both as a comprehensive review of progress over the past year in the diagnosis and treatment of breast diseases—including breast cancer and benign breast conditions—and as a forward-looking platform to discuss how clinical practice should be adjusted and optimized in the coming year to provide patients with more systematic and standardized care.
During this conference, the Chinese Expert Consensus on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Young Breast Cancer (2025 Edition) was officially released. This is the second national consensus focused on young breast cancer in China and represents the collective wisdom of more than 100 experts nationwide, developed through structured expert voting. The meeting invited experts to interpret, discuss, and explore the clinical application of this updated consensus in depth.
Another distinctive and important component of the conference was the CSCO BC Southern Forum, chaired by Academician Erwei Song. The forum closely followed cutting-edge developments in the field, reviewing annual progress and hot topics. For example, in recent years, several new targeted agents directed at the PI3K/AKT/mTOR (PAM) signaling pathway—such as inavolisib and capivasertib—have been approved. How to optimally use these more powerful therapeutic agents to precisely inhibit the PAM oncogenic pathway, which harbors mutations in over 40% of breast cancers, is a key question that urgently needs to be addressed. To this end, the forum featured a special session titled “The New Three Kingdoms of PAM Pathway Inhibitors,” which stimulated academic debate around therapeutic strategies targeting upstream, midstream, and downstream nodes of the PAM pathway. This innovative format echoed the 2020 Yat-sen Breast Cancer Conference, where the relative advantages and limitations of the three CDK4/6 inhibitors were debated, and once again provided participants with valuable clinical insights through lively discussion.
In addition, 2025 can be considered a landmark year for antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) in breast cancer. Multiple pivotal clinical studies featuring ADCs were reported. In the opening keynote lecture, Academician Binghe Xu reviewed the development history of ADCs, their current role in breast cancer treatment, and future prospects. In my view, ADCs will not only transform breast cancer therapy but also drive progress across oncology and medicine as a whole. China currently leads the world in the number of ADCs under development. Accordingly, the conference included a dedicated “ADC Future Forum,” bringing together domestic clinical experts, pharmaceutical R&D leaders, and investment professionals to jointly explore the future development of ADCs in China.
I believe ADCs represent a critical opportunity for China’s biopharmaceutical innovation sector to achieve a “leapfrog” advancement. Access to both innovative and generic drugs in China has improved substantially, with some treatments now priced at only 5–10% of their cost in Europe and the United States—bringing tremendous benefits to patients and demonstrating the growing international competitiveness of China’s pharmaceutical industry. In the ADC field specifically, China has already established a new innovation track comparable to the rise of new energy vehicles, moving from imitation to global leadership. I look forward to Chinese pharmaceutical companies delivering more precise and effective innovative therapies for breast cancer patients in China and worldwide. The cross-disciplinary discussions at this conference are also expected to help illuminate a brighter path forward for breast cancer care and the broader industry.
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Oncology Frontier: As China’s first public breast tumor specialty hospital, the Yat-sen Breast Tumor Hospital has now reached its fifth anniversary since its establishment in September 2020. As one of the key drivers of its development, could you discuss the significance of building this hospital? What achievements has it made in clinical care, scientific research, and talent cultivation? In the face of increasingly precise and multidisciplinary breast cancer care, how will the hospital continue to strengthen its unique positioning and leadership as a specialty institution?
Professor Qiang Liu: As China’s first public breast tumor specialty hospital, the Yat-sen Breast Tumor Hospital has experienced rapid development over the past five years. The number of patients treated has increased several-fold, and patient sources have expanded from across China to the global stage. Patients now come from countries such as Singapore, Cambodia, Malaysia, South Korea, the United States, and Canada, including non–Chinese-speaking patients, reflecting the growing international influence of China’s healthcare system.
Breast cancer ranks first in incidence among women in both China and worldwide, and patient numbers continue to rise rapidly. How to respond to this growing disease burden—and how to help as many patients as possible achieve cure at the lowest possible cost—has been the central mission guiding the development of our breast specialty.
Under the guidance of Academician Erwei Song, our hospital has systematically built a comprehensive subspecialty system centered on patient needs. This system encompasses breast surgery, medical oncology, radiation oncology, breast diagnostics, and an integrated breast treatment center, among others, thereby optimizing care pathways and overall treatment quality. Taking the breast diagnostic specialty as an example, we have highly integrated ultrasound, mammography, MRI, and biopsy procedures within a single specialized unit, allowing different diagnostic modalities to corroborate one another and significantly improving diagnostic accuracy. Each diagnostic physician performs more than 10,000 breast ultrasound examinations annually. Through strict quality control and feedback mechanisms, diagnostic performance has continued to improve. For instance, BI-RADS category 3 (benign) lesions and category 4A lesions (low suspicion of malignancy requiring biopsy) are often difficult to distinguish. Among more than 80,000 patients examined at our hospital last year, over 3,600 were classified as BI-RADS 4A on ultrasound, with a malignancy confirmation rate of 6.3% following biopsy or surgery—precisely within the 2–10% expected risk range defined by the American College of Radiology—fully demonstrating the high diagnostic accuracy of our breast diagnostic specialty.
In terms of multidisciplinary integration, our hospital is also the only Western medicine–based breast specialty institution in China that has formally incorporated traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) into its clinical practice, forming an integrated TCM–Western medicine team. This approach reflects both regional practice patterns in Guangdong—where many patients seek TCM treatment independently—and the ability of TCM to address common treatment-related symptoms such as fatigue and insomnia. In-hospital TCM care is more standardized and can help meet patient needs, improve treatment adherence, and reduce potential adverse effects such as liver and kidney impairment.
Overall, through the collective efforts of our high-level multidisciplinary team, the current five-year survival rate of breast cancer patients treated at our hospital has reached 92.6%, approaching or even exceeding levels reported in leading Western countries. We hope that our experience in building a breast specialty hospital can serve as a reference for similar initiatives nationwide, allowing us to collectively focus on patient needs, strengthen specialty development, and deliver high-quality care to more patients.
Professor Qiang Liu Director, Department of General Surgery Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital Sun Yat-sen University
