Industrial bases, not just science, will determine whether breakthroughs become real benefits.
Asia is the world’s cancer epicenter. The region accounts for nearly half of all new cancer cases globally – 9.2 million annually – and more than half of all cancer deaths.
China alone recorded close to 5.2 million new cases in 2024, according to the National Cancer Center, with people aged 60 and above accounting for nearly 62 percent of that figure. Southeast Asia will add a further 1.3 million new diagnoses annually by 2030 – a 70 percent increase from current levels – with projections to 2050 suggesting 2.03 million new cases a year, an 89 percent increase for men and 66 percent for women relative to 2022.
This is not merely a stress-test for overstretched public health systems. Average treatment costs for breast cancer in Southeast Asia run at US$15,000 per year, against an average regional GDP per capita of US$3,550. Some treatment regimens cost hundreds of times the regional minimum wage.
With 383 million people under the age of 35 and a median age of 30.2, Southeast Asia’s economic thesis depends on a healthy, working-age population remaining productive through the 2030s and 2040s. China’s own demographic arithmetic is no less acute: An aging population, a cancer burden already among the world’s largest, and a Healthy China 2030 agenda that has explicitly named early screening as the primary lever for improving five-year survival rates.
The conventional response, which includes building more hospitals, training more oncologists, importing more expensive equipment, cannot close that gap within any policy-relevant timeframe. There is, however, a more sustainable intervention point: Intercepting cancer before it becomes difficult and expensive to treat.
The survival cliff is the evidence
Breast cancer five-year survival at Stage I runs close to 100 percent; by Stage IV, it falls to roughly 23 percent. For colon cancer, survival rates are above 90 percent at Stage I and fall to 12 percent at Stage IV. Detect cancer a year earlier, and the survival curve shifts dramatically; detect it two years earlier and treatment costs could collapse – less chemotherapy, less surgery, less hospitalisation, fewer lost working years.
Yet over 70 percent of cancer cases across Asia and low-and-middle-income countries are diagnosed at Stage III or IV, not because patients ignored symptoms, but because the diagnostic infrastructure to find cancer earlier, including imaging equipment, specialist referral networks, endoscopy capacity, either does not exist in those settings or reaches too few people too slowly.
Apple’s Steve Jobs understood this failure in early intervention personally, though tragically too late. In 2003, a CT scan revealed an operable tumor on his pancreas. Instead of proceeding with surgery, he delayed treatment for about nine months, turning to dietary changes and alternative therapies while a potentially curable disease became far harder to treat. By most accounts, that delay allowed the cancer to metastasise. He died at 56, and his biographer Walter Isaacson later wrote that Mr Jobs – who had access to more resources and medical expertise than almost any patient in history – came to regret that decision.
For Mr. Jobs, as for many others, the failure was not in what medicine could do, but in the gap between detection and response. It is precisely this gap that modern precision diagnostics is now designed to close.
What a blood draw can now do
Liquid biopsy addresses the detection infrastructure problem at its root. Cancer cells shed microRNA sequences, DNA methylation signatures, and protein markers into the bloodstream long before a tumour becomes visible by conventional imaging. A single blood draw can now generate a risk stratification signal that a primary care physician in Hanoi, Shanghai, or Singapore can act on. Here are two examples.
First, Singapore’s GASTROClear is the world’s first approved molecular blood test for early gastric cancer detection, using 12 microRNA biomarkers in a single draw. In October 2025, it became the first blood-based cancer screening test of any kind approved by China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA), following one of the world’s largest prospective clinical trials of its kind – enrolling 9,472 subjects across seven leading Chinese academic institutions between December 2021 and November 2023. The approved screening population in China, defined as high-risk adults aged 45 to 74 under the 2024 China Guideline for Gastric Cancer Screening, involves over 500 million people.
Next, Vietnam’s SPOT-MAS, reportedly screens for five cancer types today – liver, breast, colorectal, gastric, and lung – from a single tube of blood. It was reported to have returned 70.8 percent sensitivity for confirmed cancerous lesions, 99.7 percent specificity, and a negative predictive value of 99.92 percent. Importantly, it was designed from inception for deployment in lower-income settings, where the vast majority of the world’s undetected cancer burden sits.
The convergence of clinical evidence across borders
These examples indicate that multiple jurisdictions – with different regulatory regimes, different health systems, and different epidemiological baselines – are now validating underlying technologies against the same disease burden, independently, and in parallel.
GASTROClear’s NMPA approval followed a prospective Chinese trial at the scale and rigour demanded by the world’s largest gastric cancer market. Singapore’s original Health Sciences Authority approval drew on more than 5,200 patients at a national level. Vietnam’s K-DETEK trial enrolled more than 9,000 asymptomatic individuals across dozens of clinical sites – a scale that rivals the Chinese trial in its real-world reach, designed specifically for an Asian population.
To be clear, these are not the same regulatory approval. China’s NMPA, Singapore’s HSA, and Vietnam’s Ministry of Health each set their own standards, conduct their own independent assessments, and reach their own conclusions. But it is the integrity of each jurisdiction’s regulatory process that is precisely what gives the resulting approvals their credibility.
I think that convergence matters for every health authority in the region who are now deciding whether to integrate liquid biopsy into national screening programmes. Independent validation across multiple Asian populations – each conducted under rigorous local regulatory oversight – constitutes something more robust than any single jurisdiction could produce alone. At the same time, Southeast Asia’s clinical trials did not have to ride on China’s NMPA approval, and neither was China’s approval contingent on Southeast Asia’s trials. Yet seen together, they make a stronger case than either could make separately.
The question is no longer whether these technologies work, but which countries are building the industrial base – the data infrastructure, clinical AI pipelines, regulatory frameworks, and deployment capacity – needed to deliver them at population scale.
What AI can now unlock
Oncology produces more data than any physician can synthesise in real time: Tumour profiles, genomic panels, therapy-matching scores, trial eligibility windows, evolving treatment guidelines.
In settings where specialists are thin on the ground, that information asymmetry between what is known and what reaches the point of care could itself be a clinical risk, and AI is proving to be the mechanism that closes it.
China is already moving at deployment velocity. Its AI healthcare market reached approximately 106 billion yuan (US$15 billion) in 2024 and is projected to reach US$22.26 billion by 2035 at a CAGR of 27.7 percent. The NMPA has approved 154 AI-based medical devices since 2020 – annual approvals growing at a 49.53 percent compound rate through 2024 – spanning imaging analysis, clinical decision support, and oncology diagnostics. In November 2025, China’s National Health Commission and four co-issuing agencies set a formal target: AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment universal in all primary-level medical institutions – community clinics and village health centres – by 2030, backed by CNY 15 to 20 billion (approximately US$2 to 3 billion) in government funding.
And the rollout is already underway: 50 hospitals and 500 township clinics enter AI pilot deployment between April and December 2026. Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai has open-sourced a pathology foundation model trained on more than one million digital pathology slides covering 19 cancer types. United Imaging’s AI diagnostic software – deployed across more than 2,000 hospitals nationwide – has increased pulmonary nodule detection rates by approximately 32 percent and improved radiologist reading efficiency by 26 percent. China’s national payer authority has also begun including AI-assisted diagnosis as a billable cost component in pathology service pricing – the single clearest signal that this is no longer a pilot programme, but a market.
Singapore is also building, and starting with the infrastructure layer. Here are three examples:
First, the SIMFONI programme, backed by the Ministry of Health through the National Medical Research Council, is developing Singapore-specific medical foundation AI models for deployment into public healthcare clusters.
Second, the genomic data underpinning those models is already at scale, as Assistant Professor Dr Max Lam, Chief Technology Officer of PRECISE puts it: “We’ve dramatically reduced processing time from weeks to days for 100,000 genomes – approximately 150TB of data – unlocking population-specific insights into Asian genetic diversity that are critical to Singapore’s National Precision Medicine Programme.” That foundation (Asian-specific, population-scale) is what makes AI-driven diagnostics clinically meaningful.
Third, we see clinical deployment underway. In December 2025, Curie Oncology and Oncoshot deployed AI-powered tools to match cancer patients to trials across Singapore and Malaysia. And in April 2026, MiRXES – Singapore’s first biotech unicorn – launched an agentic AI clinical knowledge assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, designed to deliver evidence-grounded responses to oncologist queries at the point of care. As MiRXES co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dr Zhou Lihan puts it: “Earlier cancer detection depends on precision, speed, and trust in the information clinicians receive.”
Closing the gap to turn innovation to region-wide benefits
While markets like China and Singapore are making headway in scaling-up precision health with AI, gaps remain across the rest of the region.
A Lancet Western Pacific analysis published in November 2025 found that AI readiness across Southeast Asia remains uneven, with data quality, infrastructure, and governance lagging behind clinical ambition. Research published in April 2025 found that ASEAN cancer screening programmes lack standardised AI integration protocols – and that AI-integrated screening could meaningfully extend early detection to underserved and remote populations where specialist density is lowest.
The encouraging part is that blood tests validated across tens of thousands of Asian patients already generate actionable early‑detection signals, and AI clinical support tools can now translate those signals into structured referral pathways and treatment summaries that physicians at every tier of the health system can use.
Now, with the science largely settled, what remains is an industrial challenge: Building the data pipelines, AI infrastructure, policy frameworks, and institutional capacity to deliver these gains at scale to the world’s youngest and fastest-growing populations – the people who need these breakthroughs most.
Having produced the clinical evidence, will Asia also build the industrial base to act on it?
Marcus Loh is the Chairman of the Public Affairs Group at the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) Asia Pacific and a Director at Temus, a Singapore AI and digital services firm. Formerly the President of the Institute of Public Relations of Singapore, he helped strengthen the role of strategic communication and public affairs amid shifting policy, technological, and geoeconomic landscapes. He is currently an MA candidate at the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
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Featured image: National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
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