A husband and wife, both with the type of leukemia featured in the movie “Dying to Survive,” have shared the stories of their long battle with the disease and the lives of their healthy children at the ongoing China International Import Expo. .
They call for more medical innovation and support for cancer patients so they can enjoy a longer and better life.
Thanks to repeated innovations and breakthroughs in the development of drugs and medical solutions, cancer is no longer such a deadly disease. More and more patients can achieve ‘clinical recovery’ by surviving more than five years.
The World Health Organization has defined chronic diseases as non-communicable diseases that persist for a long period of time (the five-year survival rate is more than 50 percent). Under regular and effective treatment and management, some cancers have become chronic diseases, much like diabetes or heart disease.
Liu Zhengchen, founder of the New Sunshine Charity Foundation, signed a cooperation agreement with Novartis at the CIIE to improve the patient support and service system to improve patients’ self-management ability, promote exchanges between experts and expand New Sunshine’s charity projects.
New Sunshine is a leading charity focused on chronic myelogenous leukemia and other serious types of diseases. It has the country’s only non-governmental stem cell bank and a patient school that provides education to sick children.
“I am a CML patient myself and a beneficiary of the innovative medicine, which has allowed me to survive so long and even have a family,” Liu said.
“Based on my own experience, New Sunshine was founded in 2012, providing treatment support to patients and sponsoring medical research and physician training.
“By working with a top company like Novartis, we can provide patients with more professional and high-quality service and assistance to Chinese patients, who can also enjoy a good life and have access to more innovative medicines and therapies.”
Liu said he specifically arranged his honeymoon to visit Novartis headquarters in Switzerland and meet one of the scientists who invented the innovative drug Glivec.
“The scientist is Elisabeth Buchdunger, so I named my first daughter Elisa to express my gratitude to scientists, whose discovery has saved the lives of so many patients like me,” he said.
Ti Gong
Walking with the sun. Novartis has signed a partnership agreement with the New Sunshine Charity Foundation to enhance CML patient support and service systems at the CIIE.
Novartis officials expressed their enthusiasm to collaborate with Chinese patient organizations and foundations to provide greater support to patients and raise greater social awareness.
In addition to working with New Sunshine, the company also announced that it will collaborate with China Alliance in the field of rare diseases. It will create a program to help people with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, a rare blood disorder that causes hemolytic anemia, chronic kidney disease or blood clots if left untreated.
Dr. Zhang Liansheng of Lanzhou University Second Hospital said that the treatment of PNH has been significantly improved, but the difficulty in getting an accurate diagnosis and timely treatment, as well as the high medical costs, are all a burden on patients and their families.
“Collaboration between leading pharmaceutical companies and patient alliances can bring greater hope to patients,” he said.
In addition to leukemia, local medical experts announced the latest results of a clinical trial in terminal patients with lung cancer after taking targeted drugs. As many as 63 percent of Asian patients with ALK-positive advanced lung cancer live longer than five years without disease progression.
“In these patients, we can see that lung cancer patients can survive for more than five years or more without development,” said Dr. Zhou Caicun of Shanghai East Hospital.
“It means that lung cancer becomes a chronic disease and patients can achieve clinical recovery. We urge more doctors to focus on clinical recovery as the goal of lung cancer treatment, by adopting more accurate and reasonable treatment and improving the entire process management, while patients should do better self-management and follow doctors’ instructions follow closely.”
At the CIIE, the China International Exchange and Promotive Association for Medical and Health Care signed a cooperation agreement with Pfizer to increase clinical recovery awareness in the field of ALK-positive lung cancer by promoting health education among patients, doctors and the public.
The first guidelines for the management of lung cancer patients in the form of chronic diseases were also published in the CIIE, covering all knowledge on disease screening, treatment, management of side effects, rehabilitation, mental support, nutrition and life management to ensure long-term survival to streamline.
Ti Gong
The first chronic disease management guidelines for lung cancer patients are released at the CIIE. It covers all knowledge about disease screening, treatment, side effect management, rehabilitation, mental support, nutrition and life management to streamline long-term survival.
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