Cancer care will eventually say goodbye to the "assembly line." When treatment strategies shift from the "disease" to the "person," true precision medicine has only just begun.
Every 4 February, World Cancer Day reminds us of a sobering fact: cancer remains one of the world's most serious public health challenges. This year's theme is — "people-centred care, united against cancer (People-Centred Care)".
Starting in 2025, the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) officially launched a three-year global campaign theme: United by Unique. This means the call is no longer simply to "defeat cancer," but to "understand how each unique person lives with cancer."
Cancer's "Schrödinger" Dilemma: Why Can't a One-Size-Fits-All Approach Cover Individual Differences?
We often say that "every cancer patient is different." This is no figure of speech — it is a stark biological reality. Cancer is, in essence, a complex disease in which the body's own cells stage an "uprising" at the genetic level and continue to evolve. The cause of that uprising (gene mutations), the way it spreads (invasion and metastasis), and its response to treatment all differ enormously from one person to another.
This creates a fundamental dilemma: behind what looks like the same diagnosis may lie diseases that are entirely different at the molecular level, with vastly different trajectories and lethal risks.
The conventional system of prevention and treatment is like responding to an "uprising with a known pattern":
● Screening: relies on a limited set of generic risk labels (such as age and smoking history) for large-scale "sweeps."
● Treatment: standardized protocols selected on the basis of anatomical staging (such as TNM staging).
● Follow-up: monitoring on a fixed schedule until recurrence is "confirmed."
This system has saved countless lives, but as its "universality" meets cancer's "uniqueness," two major pain points are becoming ever more apparent:
● Insufficient protection: some high-risk individuals are never identified and miss the window for early intervention
● Excessive intervention: some low-risk patients endure unnecessary treatment and long-term anxiety
The root of the problem is that we have been using a rough "generic map" to navigate an endlessly changing "personal terrain of life."
People-Centred Care Is Not Just "Treating Well" — It Is "Knowing Earlier" and "Taking Fewer Detours"
When the "person" is truly placed before the disease, the path of cancer care changes. It is no longer simply: diagnosis → treatment → the end.
It becomes:
● Can it be found earlier?
● Does everyone really need the same intensity of follow-up?
● Who is at high risk, and who can rest easier?
Within this shift, early screening and post-operative recurrence risk stratification are precisely the steps most easily overlooked, yet the most "people-centred" of all.
Mapping an Individualized "River Basin of Life" — Elixir™ · LuCa™
The Elixir™-LuCa™ lung cancer early screening model is a frontier practice of this very idea. Not content with generic risk labels, it captures an individual's high-dimensional molecular signals through a single blood NMR test and analyzes them systematically with the help of AI models.
What does it look at?
The overall metabolic homeostasis — built from a large number of metabolic molecules — that reflects an individual's physiological state.
How does it identify risk?
By combining non-destructive NMR technology with a Transformer-based large model, it identifies risk features associated with early-stage lung cancer from high-dimensional molecular signals. These feature patterns are a comprehensive expression of an individual's long-term physiological state, rather than a dependence on any single clinical indicator or past medical history.
What LuCa™ provides, therefore, is not merely a "high risk or not" verdict, but an earlier and more individualized risk alert. It helps people move from passive screening toward active, continuous health monitoring.
Delivering Stratified "Precision Navigation for Recurrence" — PT-L1™
Faced with the central anxiety of "am I one of the few who will relapse?", conventional pathological staging has no answer, leaving patients caught in the same anxious cycle of intensive repeat examinations.
Starting from an entirely new dimension — the "functional proteome" — PT-L1™ analyzes the residual systemic signals in post-operative blood and assesses whether a "microenvironment" favorable to cancer recurrence still exists in the body.
Its core value lies in "stratification":
It precisely separates patients with the same pathological stage into molecular-level "high recurrence risk" and "low recurrence risk" groups.
How does it change the clinical pathway?
High-risk group: indicating a need for more intensive monitoring and intervention
Low-risk group: reducing excessive follow-up and easing the long-term psychological burden
The essence of PT-L1™ is the "precision deployment" of treatment and follow-up resources, so that both care and vigilance are directed where they truly matter.
United by Unique: Beyond Technology Lies the Depth of Empathy
The profound meaning of "United by Unique" is that the highest mission of all technological progress is to enable deeper human empathy and individual dignity.
LuCa™ and PT-L1™ are the technological footnotes to this idea.
● Earlier insight (LuCa™) gives individuals the agency and composure to manage their own health proactively.
● More accurate discrimination (PT-L1™) means follow-up and care no longer follow a one-size-fits-all pattern.
We believe the most important progress against cancer is not simply extending survival, but ensuring that every unique life, at every critical juncture, is truly seen, accurately understood, and given guidance better suited to who they are.
