China's Top Departments: Medical Oncology at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (Guangzhou)

For readers in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and worldwide: if you or a loved one is facing gastric cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer, lymphoma or breast cancer — and needs drug therapy such as chemotherapy, targeted therapy or immunotherapy — the Department of Medical Oncology at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (SYSUCC) in Guangzhou is one of the most experienced and academically accomplished drug-treatment centers in China.

About the Hospital

Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (SYSUCC) was founded in March 1964. Also known as the Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University and the SYSU Cancer Institute, it is one of the largest and most academically accomplished comprehensive cancer centers in China, and one of the four earliest-established cancer hospitals in the country. In the Fudan Institute of Hospital Management's 2023 China Hospital Rankings, the Center is rated A+++ overall and ranks No. 2 nationwide in the Oncology specialty ranking; it has repeatedly received the highest grade (A) for specialized cancer hospitals in China's national tertiary public hospital performance assessment.

• Scale: Two campuses in operation (Yuexiu and Huangpu), with 2,245 beds; 2.558 million outpatient/emergency visits and 222,000 inpatient admissions per year — among the highest volumes of any specialized cancer hospital in China
• Talent: 3 Members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 3 Members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, 47 national-level talents; 231 doctoral supervisors and 334 master's supervisors
• International services: The SYSUCC International Medical Center opened in July 2026, offering one-stop oncology care for international patients. SYSUCC is a sister hospital of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (ranked No. 1 in the U.S. for oncology) and collaborates with the Karolinska Institute (Sweden), the University of Warwick (UK), the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and Erasmus MC (the Netherlands). It has been a WHO Collaborating Centre for Cancer Research since 1980
• International academic standing: Ranked No. 1 in China for oncology in the 2023 China Hospital STEM rankings; ranked 5th among cancer centers worldwide in the 2024 Nature Index. It publishes the English-language journal Cancer Communications (impact factor 24.9, JCR Oncology Q1)

About the Department

The Department of Medical Oncology (listed as "Internal Medicine" in the Chinese department directory) is one of the Center's largest clinical departments. Its roots trace back to the "Chemotherapy Specialty Group" established in 1965, and it was formally founded as a department in 1972. It is one of the earliest and academically strongest oncology medical education, research and clinical bases in China, and is recognized nationally as a leading unit in cancer chemotherapy.

Across the Yuexiu and Huangpu campuses, the department has 6 wards (focusing on lung cancer, gastrointestinal cancer, lymphoma, breast cancer and urologic tumors), providing individualized comprehensive drug treatment — chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy, endocrine therapy, high-dose chemotherapy with autologous stem cell rescue, CAR-T cell immunotherapy and clinical trials.

• Scale: 285 open beds, plus a 12-bed day-care chemotherapy unit
• Team: 66 healthcare professionals with senior titles
• Sub-specialties: gastrointestinal cancer, thoracic oncology (lung cancer), breast cancer, lymphoma and a stem cell transplant section

Academic Standing and Accreditations

• Leading unit: nationally recognized leading unit in cancer chemotherapy and one of China's earliest oncology medical education, research and clinical bases
• Clinical trials: a major anticancer drug clinical research center in China and, since 1983, one of the first batch of Ministry of Health anticancer new drug clinical evaluation bases
• Phase I ward: established in March 2014, the first Phase I clinical research ward for anticancer new drugs independently managed by a hospital in China
• Guideline impact: over the past five years, more than 92 findings from frontline clinical research at the Center have been adopted by global oncology treatment standards and guidelines; research from the department's gastrointestinal oncology team has been cited by 8 international guidelines and 84 classic English-language monographs
• Team awards: the gastrointestinal oncology team has received the Second Prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award (2017, 2019), the First Prize of the Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Award (2016, 2018), the Outstanding Scientific Research Achievement Award of the Ministry of Education (2016, 2018) and the Chinese Medical Science and Technology Award (2016, 2018)

Core Technologies and Signature Treatments

1. Gastrointestinal medical oncology (the department's flagship, led by an academician) — The team led by Academician Rui-Hua Xu has long focused on the diagnosis, precision treatment and translational research of gastrointestinal cancers (esophageal, gastric, colorectal, liver, bile duct and pancreatic cancer). It created new strategies to overcome immunotherapy resistance and pioneered a Chinese immunotherapy regimen for gastrointestinal cancers that achieved the world's best efficacy — a breakthrough from a "Chinese regimen" to a "global standard", published in top journals such as JAMA, BMJ and Nature Medicine. In early diagnosis, it identified a ctDNA methylation marker panel for early detection of liver cancer and independently developed an AI-assisted endoscopy system with a 96% diagnostic accuracy for upper gastrointestinal cancers; in targeted therapy, it optimized treatment for advanced HER2-positive gastric cancer and found that a UGT1A1-guided modified XELIRI regimen had efficacy comparable to FOLFIRI with lower toxicity in second-line colorectal cancer
2. Immunotherapy combinations for advanced gastric cancer — guideline-changing level — RATIONALE-305: a global, multicenter, double-blind, randomized phase III trial led by Prof. Rui-Hua Xu (146 institutions across China, South Korea, Japan, Europe and North America; 997 patients, nearly half from outside China). Adding the domestic PD-1 antibody tislelizumab to chemotherapy significantly prolonged overall survival in advanced gastric cancer, raising median overall survival from 12.9 to 15 months, with benefit also seen in patients with peritoneal metastasis (The BMJ, May 2024). NEOSUMMIT-01: a randomized phase II trial of perioperative toripalimab plus chemotherapy in locally advanced gastric/gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma that achieved a pathological significant response rate of 44.4% (vs 20.4% for chemotherapy alone) and a pathological complete response rate of 22.2% (vs 7.4%) — the world's first randomized controlled trial of perioperative immunotherapy plus chemotherapy in locally advanced gastric cancer to meet its primary endpoint (Nature Medicine, January 2024)
3. Neoadjuvant immunotherapy for locally advanced rectal cancer — A prospective, randomized controlled trial by the colorectal cancer MDT team led by Prof. Rui-Hua Xu (134 patients with mismatch repair-proficient locally advanced rectal cancer) showed that neoadjuvant concurrent chemoradiotherapy plus sintilimab significantly increased the complete response rate (44.8% vs 26.9%) and improved the proportion of patients who could avoid surgery (watch-and-wait) (Cancer Cell, 2024)
4. Medical treatment of lung cancer and novel drug clinical research (thoracic oncology) — The lung cancer team led by Prof. Li Zhang subdivides lung cancer into finer molecular subtypes and designs individualized treatment based on tumor genetic background and biological behavior; several agents studied by the team have been approved by China's NMPA for lung cancer, and the team led the drafting of the Chinese edition of the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
5. Medical treatment and cell therapy for lymphoma (lymphoma sub-specialty) — Individualized treatment including chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy, high-dose chemotherapy with autologous stem cell rescue, CAR-T cell immunotherapy and clinical trials. The team has contributed to risk stratification and treatment strategies in NK/T-cell lymphoma and to managing lymphoma with hepatitis B/EBV infection; its publications have been cited by Chinese expert consensus statements and NCCN guidelines
6. Medical treatment of breast cancer (breast cancer sub-specialty) — The breast team (39 professionals, including 3 professors and 7 associate professors) works in an MDT to provide individualized endocrine therapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy and immunotherapy by stage and molecular subtype. In 2017 it became the first in China to establish a breast cancer genetic counseling clinic; the SYSUCC-001 study was presented as an oral report at ASCO 2020
7. Clinical research on new anticancer drugs and translational medicine — The technology-transfer agreement for Prof. Rui-Hua Xu's team's "immunotherapy-enhancing live bacterial agent" (RX-af01) carried a total value of RMB 500 million in milestones plus a 5% net sales royalty — the Center's largest technology transfer to date. At the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting, SYSUCC had 13 oral presentations selected (nearly 20% of China's total), 11 of them from Prof. Xu's team

Expert Team

• Prof. Rui-Hua Xu: Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (elected 2025); Director of SYSUCC, President of the Affiliated Cancer Hospital and Director of the Cancer Institute; Director of the State Key Laboratory of Malignant Tumor Prevention and Treatment in South China; Chief Expert for Colorectal Cancer. His academic expertise is medical treatment of gastrointestinal (esophageal, gastric and intestinal) cancers. He created new strategies to overcome immunotherapy resistance and pioneered a Chinese immunotherapy regimen for gastrointestinal cancers with the world's best efficacy. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Communications (impact factor 24.9), has received two Second Prizes of the National Science and Technology Progress Award as first contributor, and has won the National Innovation Competition Award, the Ho Leung Ho Lee Science and Technology Award, the Tan Jiazhen Clinical Medicine Award, the Wu Jieping Medical Innovation Award and the 2024 CSCO Annual Achievement Award in Clinical Oncology. He has published more than 200 SCI papers as corresponding or first author in top journals (JAMA, The BMJ, Cell, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Lancet Oncology and others)
• Prof. Li Zhang: Director-Mentor of the Department of Medical Oncology, Deputy Director of the SYSU Lung Cancer Institute, Director of the Phase I Ward; Chief Expert for Lung Cancer. He specializes in chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy and multidisciplinary treatment of primary lung cancer and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, trained at Institut Gustave Roussy (France), Fox Chase Cancer Center and MD Anderson Cancer Center (USA), and led the drafting of the Chinese edition of the NCCN NSCLC guidelines
• Prof. Hui-Qiang Huang: Deputy Director of the Department of Medical Oncology, Professor, an expert in lymphoma
• Prof. Feng Wang: Deputy Director of the Department of Medical Oncology, Professor and doctoral supervisor; a principal investigator of the FRUTIGA study of immunotherapy for gastric cancer, published in Nature Medicine
• Prof. Shu-Sen Wang: Professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of Medical Oncology, Chief Expert of the Breast Cancer Medical Treatment Group
• Department team: 66 healthcare professionals with senior titles; core experts also include Yu-Hong Li, Feng-Hua Wang and Miao-Zhen Qiu (Chief Physician, attending professor and doctoral supervisor; postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University; national high-level young talent)

Conditions Treated (reference for international patients)

• Gastrointestinal cancers: chemotherapy, targeted therapy and immunotherapy for gastric cancer (including HER2-positive and peritoneal metastasis), colorectal cancer, esophageal cancer, liver cancer, bile duct cancer and pancreatic cancer
• Advanced gastric cancer: first-line immunotherapy plus chemotherapy; locally advanced gastric cancer: perioperative immunotherapy plus chemotherapy
• Locally advanced rectal cancer: neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy plus immunotherapy (including sphincter preservation and watch-and-wait evaluation)
• Lung cancer: molecular subtype-guided chemotherapy, targeted therapy and immunotherapy
• Lymphoma (including NK/T-cell lymphoma): chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy, high-dose chemotherapy with autologous stem cell rescue and CAR-T cell therapy
• Breast cancer: individualized endocrine therapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy and immunotherapy, plus genetic counseling
• New anticancer drug clinical trials (including Phase I studies): evaluation and enrollment consultation

Address and Contact

• Yuexiu Campus (main): No. 651 Dongfeng East Road, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China — easily reached from Hong Kong West Kowloon by high-speed rail
• Huangpu Campus: No. 1 Kaiyang 5th Road, Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City, Huangpu District, Guangzhou
• Website: www.sysucc.org.cn
• International services: SYSUCC International Medical Center (opened July 2026), offering one-stop services for international patients

For another signature specialty at the same hospital, see our SYSUCC nasopharyngeal carcinoma department spotlight.

This information is compiled from the official website of Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center and public reports. It is for reference only; the hospital's latest official information shall prevail.