Abstract:

On July 30–31, 2016, the 4th Cancer Chemoprevention Symposium, co-hosted by Peking University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (PKUSPS) and the State Key Laboratory of Natural and Biomimetic Drugs (SKLNBD), and exclusively sponsored by Shenzhen Fushan Biotech Co. Ltd., was successfully held in Peking University Health Science Center (PKUHSC), to promote the academic communications among cancer chemoprevention researchers both in China and internationally, and to discuss the future direction of cancer chemoprevention studies in China. Cancer chemoprevention refers to the strategy to block, delay or reverse the process of carcinogenesis by using of natural or synthetic chemicals, and has attracted more and more research interests. China is facing a serious challenge from cancers, and has made significant contributions to cancer prevention research worldwide. “To cure the disease before it happens” has been a motto of traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years, however, the chemoprevention studies in China are still lagging behind the needs of cancer control and international research community. To promote cancer chemoprevention researches in China, PKUSPS has organized the 1st and 2nd Cancer Chemoprevention Symposia in 2010 and 2012, respectively; the 3rd one was hosted by Jiangsu Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Nanjing, 2014. PKUSPS also organized the 471st Xiangshan Science Conference of “Frontiers in Cancer Chemoprevention” in 2013, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has set up a study section of “cancer chemoprevention” in 2012, and called a strategic symposium on “tumor chemoprevention” in 2016.