Early screening and diagnosis and the accelerated research and development of innovative drugs are important for the prevention and treatment of cancers, medical experts reiterated ahead of the National Cancer Prevention and Control Publicity Week.

The publicity week kicks off on April 15 each year.

Experts have called for individuals aged 40 and above and those with a family history of tumors in the digestive tract to undergo gastrointestinal endoscopy examinations every five years as patients do not show obvious symptoms during the early stage.

In recent years, new malignant tumor cases in China have numbered around 3.8 million per year, with stomach cancer and colorectal cancer accounting for most of the cases of tumors of the digestive tract.

Sun Yan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a clinical oncology expert, said that for most cancer types, the medical treatment in China today is almost as good as, if not better than developed countries.

At least eight innovative drugs by local pharmaceutical companies have been used to treat cancers, including lung cancer, breast cancer, and lymphoma, from 2018 to 2020.

German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim said that more than one-third of its global R&D pipeline covers the oncology field, and 75 percent of them are first-in-class new drugs globally.

"Our R&D objective is to develop four tumor drugs from pre-clinical research each year," said Zhang Wei, head of medicine at Boehringer Ingelheim Greater China.

The company said that in collaboration with the oncology department of Shanghai East Hospital, a Phase-I global clinical trial on a small molecule inhibitor independently developed by the company to treat colorectal cancer has been initiated.