About 4.8 billion people, or 60% of the world's population, live in Asia. But the region's cancer burden is even greater. Half of the world's new cancer cases and 60% of cancer deaths occur in Asia. AstraZeneca plans to launch 20 new medicines, including 10 anticancer drugs, by 2030 to narrow this gap.
Sylvia Varela, AstraZeneca's vice president for Asia, laid out the goal at a media briefing for ESMO Asia 2025 in Singapore on the 6th local time. She emphasized, "With population growth, aging, and lifestyle changes, Asia's cancer burden will grow over the next 10 years."
She also said the company would widen its response to include improving health care infrastructure, including expanding screening. Vice President Varela said, "Scientific innovation alone cannot create sustainable change," and noted, "We will work together to resolve shortages in screening systems, fragmented care pathways, and shortages of health care personnel and infrastructure that countries are facing."
AstraZeneca is working with governments across Asia to introduce an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chest X-ray analysis solution. The target is lung cancer, one of the most common cancers in the region.
Thailand plans to invest $13 million by 2027 to roll out the solution at nearly 900 hospitals. Malaysia also began early adoption at 127 clinics, aiming for a nationwide rollout next year. The Philippines is currently using it at 11 hospitals.
Vice President Varela said, "In Vietnam, analysis suggests that introducing the solution could identify more than 3,000 additional early lung cancer patients over the next five years and prevent about 5,000 premature deaths," adding, "If governments, medical institutions, and civil society work together, more patients can receive more advanced treatment faster."
The company will also strengthen personalized treatment strategies. Mark Sims, global franchise head and vice president for EGFR-mutated lung cancer, said, "Lung cancer must be attacked from multiple angles at the same time," and added, "Alongside immunotherapies that activate the immune system, T-cell engagers, and cell therapies, we need approaches that directly attack cancer cells, including Antibody-Drug Conjugate (ADC), radioligand therapies, DNA damage response targets, tumor driver inhibitors, resistance-targeted strategies, and epigenetics-based new drugs."
He also stressed the importance of early intervention. Vice President Sims said, "As patients who start treatment in the early stages show long-term survival, in some types of lung cancer, cure has become a realistic goal."
The form of lung cancer AstraZeneca is especially focusing on is EGFR-mutated Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This cancer appears in 30% to 40% of Asian patients and has higher incidence among younger patients, non-smokers, and women. Vice President Sims said, "Our goal is to build a comprehensive treatment strategy spanning from the early, surgery-eligible stage to advanced and metastatic stages."
To that end, the company is conducting the NeoADAURA study to assess the effect of targeted therapy before surgery. In this approach, surgery-eligible early-stage patients receive Tagrisso (ingredient name Osimertinib), an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), as neoadjuvant therapy. He said, "Early this year, we confirmed the clinical benefit of neoadjuvant Tagrisso, and in the patient-reported outcomes (PRO) released this time, functional status and quality of life were well maintained."
Meaningful data also emerged in the advanced stage. Vice President Sims said, "Tagrisso plus platinum–pemetrexed combination therapy clearly improved overall survival (OS) compared with Tagrisso monotherapy, and the median survival reached four years." He said this effectively confirmed about one additional year of survival benefit.
Based on this, AstraZeneca aims to cement Tagrisso as a backbone therapy across pre-treatment settings. Vice President Sims said, "We are also developing follow-on treatment options targeting MET overexpression and amplification, the most common resistance mechanisms after first-line therapy."