The core of the argument is methodological. Conventional assessments of water security rely on hydrological modelling, infrastructure inventories and supply-side statistics: how many pipes exist, how much water is available, how many connections are installed. These measures say nothing about whether the water that reaches a household is safe, reliable, acceptable or affordable, or about the trade-offs families make when it is not. Experiential scales change that. The Household Water Insecurity Experiences Scale, known as HWISE, was developed and validated for low- and middle-income settings and asks households directly about problems such as worrying about having enough water, going without washing, or drinking water they believed was unsafe. Similarly, the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale and the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale capture lived experiences of hunger and dietary compromise. When deployed together, these instruments reveal coupled deprivation that neither measure can expose alone.

The clearest illustration comes from Walgett, a remote town of roughly 2,000 people in northern New South Wales, where the Barwon and Namoi rivers meet. Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations there had raised concerns about drinking water quality for years. In 2018, national media reported that sodium concentrations in the town supply had reached approximately 300 milligrams per litre, nearly double the Australian palatability guideline and far above levels recommended for people managing chronic conditions such as hypertension and kidney disease, which occur at high prevalence in Aboriginal populations. From a purely infrastructural standpoint, Walgett had a functioning water system. From the perspective of the people drinking the water, it was a system that many could not safely or acceptably use.

In 2022, supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Ideas Grant, the community ran a survey using the internationally validated HWISE and food insecurity instruments. The results were stark. Forty-six per cent of participants experienced food insecurity and 44 per cent experienced water insecurity, while almost one third experienced both at the same time. Participants who were water insecure were far more likely to be food insecure, a statistical association that turns the abstract policy language of integration into a measurable household reality. Four out of five respondents relied on bottled water, typically spending between 30 and 50 Australian dollars a week on it. In a low-income community, that recurring expenditure directly competes with the household food budget, effectively converting a water quality failure into a nutrition problem.

The surveys also changed the politics. Wendy Spencer, General Manager of the Dharriwaa Elders Group, described the shift in terms that capture why experiential data matters beyond its technical content. Prior to the surveys, she said, the community knew there was a problem but no one would listen; the data gave them a voice and helped inform their solutions. That observation goes to the heart of the authors’ case. Infrastructure descriptors and aggregate supply statistics cannot register the daily decisions of a parent choosing between bottled water and fresh vegetables, but a validated experiential scale can, and in doing so it creates evidence that institutions are obliged to engage with.

Walgett is not an outlier. Modelling by the Australian National University, published in npj Clean Water, estimated that more than 600,000 people across more than 400 locations are likely consuming water that does not meet health guidelines for quality, and that 44 per cent of those locations are Aboriginal communities. Read together with the Walgett survey findings, this points to a systemic national problem rather than a collection of local anomalies. Yet the authors note that Australia’s current consultation on a National Food Security Strategy does not explicitly position water insecurity as a priority area. Without experiential indicators embedded in national monitoring, they argue, the strategy risks addressing food supply and affordability while overlooking the fundamental constraint that unsafe or unacceptable water places on what households can prepare, drink and afford.

The mechanism linking water to food is worth spelling out, because it operates through several distinct pathways. Poor water quality forces substitution: households avoid the tap and buy bottled water or switch to sugar-sweetened beverages, a pattern documented in international research on tap water avoidance and diet-related disease. Unreliable supply disrupts food preparation and hygiene, raising the risk of gastrointestinal illness that itself worsens nutritional status. And the financial burden of alternative water sources crowds out spending on healthy food. Each pathway is invisible in infrastructure statistics, and each becomes quantifiable when water insecurity is measured experientially alongside food insecurity. This is why the authors describe integration as a methodological necessity rather than an advocacy aspiration.

The same logic is now spreading through the Asia Pacific. In Timor-Leste, an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research-funded project led by Permatil, a community-based organisation promoting permaculture and sustainable livelihoods, has begun training local practitioners and piloting the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale and the Water Insecurity Experiences Scales. Outcome data are not yet available, but the initiative demonstrates a capacity-building model in which local organisations lead survey implementation, ethical data collection and community-centred evidence generation, embedding experiential measurement within broader water management and food system work. For a young nation where households face interacting pressures from climate variability, the approach offers a way to detect vulnerability that conventional indicators alone cannot capture.

For the water research and engineering community, the implications are practical rather than rhetorical. The authors point to case studies from Nepal and Sierra Leone showing that experiential water insecurity measures are useful for monitoring and evaluating WASH programs, revealing behavioural and economic barriers that determine whether technically sound interventions actually improve lives. Paired with biophysical indicators, experiential data provide a fuller picture of system performance: they can sharpen targeting, strengthen accountability, and test whether policies are moving the outcomes that matter to households. The metrics the authors propose are concrete and demanding: fewer families forced to spend scarce income on bottled water, fewer households facing trade-offs between water and food, and more equitable access to safe, reliable drinking water.

What makes the argument compelling is that it reframes who defines the problem. A water system can look adequate on paper while failing the people it serves, and a food strategy can project national abundance while households in remote communities ration both what they drink and what they eat. Measuring experiences closes that gap between system-level adequacy and household-level reality, and the Walgett case shows the data can shift power as well as policy, giving Aboriginal community organisations the evidence to demand and design their own solutions. As climate change accelerates and water variability deepens across Australia and the Asia Pacific, the authors’ conclusion is blunt: integrating experiential measures of water insecurity into food security measurement and policy is no longer optional. It is the difference between a strategy that counts pipes and one that counts people.

Subject of Research: Experiential measurement of household water and food insecurity to inform integrated food and water security policy in Australia and the Asia Pacific

Article Title: Measuring people’s experiences to inform integrated solutions to food and water security in Australia and the Asia Pacific region

Article References: Webster, J., Spencer, W., Corby, C., Lemos, E., & Leslie, G. (2026). Measuring people’s experiences to inform integrated solutions to food and water security in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. PLOS Water, 5(10), e0000647. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000647

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000647

Keywords: water insecurity, food security, HWISE scale, Walgett, Timor-Leste, Aboriginal health, drinking water quality, experiential measures, PLOS Water, climate variability, national food strategy, Asia Pacific

PrEP, the use of antiretroviral medication by HIV-negative individuals to prevent infection, has transformed prevention science since its regulatory approval. When taken as prescribed, oral PrEP reduces the risk of acquiring HIV through sexual exposure by around 99 percent, a level of efficacy that has made it a cornerstone of global efforts to end the AIDS epidemic. Yet the roll-out of PrEP has been uneven worldwide, and the Asia-Pacific region, home to diverse epidemics concentrated among specific populations, presents a particularly complex picture. The new study set out to quantify whether national laws and policies affecting those populations correlate with whether PrEP is reported as available at all.

The research team used a cross-national ecological design, drawing entirely on secondary data that countries submit to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Rather than collecting new survey data, the investigators extracted country-level indicators covering laws, legal protections, and the participation of key populations in the development of HIV-related policies. This approach allowed them to construct a standardized legal-policy profile for each of the 40 countries, but it also means the analysis captures associations at the population level rather than causal relationships at the individual level.

The indicators focused on four groups that UNAIDS classifies as key populations because they bear a disproportionate share of HIV burden: people who inject drugs, female sex workers, transgender people, and men who have sex with men. In total, 22 indicators were compiled, with seven covering people who inject drugs, four covering female sex workers, six covering transgender people, and five covering men who have sex with men. These indicators were combined into cumulative legal-policy scores for each country, with a maximum possible score of 22. Higher scores reflected legal environments with more punitive or restrictive provisions affecting key populations, alongside weaker protections and less meaningful participation of those communities in policy-making.

Countries were then sorted into three categories based on their reported PrEP status: those reporting PrEP availability, those reporting non-availability, and those that did not report PrEP status at all. The distribution itself is telling. Only 12 of the 40 countries reported that PrEP was available, 14 reported it was not available, and another 14 provided no report on PrEP status whatsoever. In other words, fewer than a third of the countries in the analysis could confirm that this highly effective prevention tool had reached their health systems, at least as reflected in UNAIDS reporting.

The mean cumulative legal-policy scores revealed a sharp divide. Countries reporting PrEP availability had a mean score of 8.92, while countries reporting non-availability averaged 10.07. Countries with no reported PrEP data, however, averaged just 1.71, a dramatic drop that the authors describe as structurally suggestive. The one-way analysis of variance, or ANOVA, used to compare mean scores across the three groups found statistically significant differences, with the Bonferroni post-hoc test indicating that the overall difference was driven primarily by the countries with non-reported PrEP data.

That statistical pattern carries an important interpretive caution. The scores of countries reporting PrEP availability and those reporting non-availability were relatively close to each other, both sitting in the range of roughly nine to ten points on the 22-point scale. The outlier was the non-reporting group. The authors conclude that non-reporting of PrEP, when it coincides with non-reporting of legal-policy indicators, points to possible links with unfavourable legal contexts and limited prevention readiness rather than representing a neutral data gap. In their framing, the absence of data is not random noise; it is a signal that clusters with the weakest legal protections for key populations.

This finding resonates with a well-documented body of public health evidence. Criminalisation of drug use, sex work, and same-sex relations is known to push key populations away from health services, increase stigma, and complicate the work of community-based organisations. Where laws are punitive, governments may also lack the political infrastructure or willingness to establish PrEP programmes, to collect data about them, or to report that data transparently to international bodies. The ecological design of this study cannot establish which of these mechanisms is at work, but the correlation between the lowest legal-policy scores and complete non-reporting is consistent with the idea that legal environments shape not only service delivery but also the visibility of prevention efforts in global monitoring systems.

The methodological strengths of the analysis lie in its breadth and its use of standardized international reporting. By relying on UNAIDS submissions, the study avoids the inconsistencies that arise when researchers assemble data from heterogeneous national sources, and the 22-indicator framework provides a quantifiable, reproducible measure of legal vulnerability across four distinct populations. The use of ANOVA with Bonferroni correction reflects a conservative approach to statistical testing, reducing the risk of false positives when comparing multiple groups. At the same time, the authors and readers alike must bear in mind the inherent limits of ecological inference: country-level averages cannot reveal how laws affect any individual’s access to PrEP, and the cross-sectional design captures a single moment rather than change over time.

The implications for policy are nonetheless direct. If non-reporting signals weak prevention readiness, then international monitoring frameworks may need to treat missing PrEP data as a red flag rather than a blank cell. The study’s authors suggest that their findings point to possible links between unfavourable legal contexts and limited prevention infrastructure, underscoring the argument that expanding PrEP in the Asia-Pacific region will require more than drug procurement and clinical guidelines. It will require legal reform, protection of key populations, and their genuine participation in shaping HIV policy. As the global community pursues targets for ending AIDS as a public health threat, this analysis of 40 countries makes clear that the law, and even the decision of whether to report at all, may be as decisive as any pill.

Subject of Research: The relationship between national legal policy environments and reported PrEP availability for key populations across Asia-Pacific countries

Article Title: An ecological analysis of legal policy environments and reported pre exposure prophylaxis availability for key populations in Asia Pacific countries

Article References: An ecological analysis of legal policy environments and reported pre exposure prophylaxis availability for key populations in Asia Pacific countries. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00459-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00459-7

Keywords: HIV, PrEP, pre-exposure prophylaxis, key populations, criminalisation, legal and policy environment, Asia-Pacific, UNAIDS, HIV prevention, men who have sex with men, transgender people, people who inject drugs

The study, authored by Chenchen Wu of Anhui Normal University in China, departs from conventional econometric practice in a way that matters for how governments interpret the numbers. Most analyses of the climate-tourism nexus rely on mean-based regression techniques, which estimate a single average effect and implicitly assume the relationship holds everywhere. Wu instead applies the Method of Moments Quantile Regression approach, a technique introduced by Machado and Silva in 2019 that estimates effects across the entire conditional distribution of the outcome variable. In practical terms, this means the analysis can distinguish between what drives tourism in destinations receiving relatively few arrivals and what drives tourism in destinations already flooded with visitors, rather than collapsing both into one misleading average.

The dataset draws on World Bank records for ten Asia-Pacific economies over nearly a quarter century, a period that encompasses the region’s extraordinary tourism boom, the global financial crisis, and the catastrophic collapse and recovery of international travel surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Four explanatory variables anchor the analysis. Carbon emissions capture the carbon-intensive character of economic activity. Ecological footprint, a measure developed by Wackernagel and Rees, quantifies the total biologically productive area an economy consumes, making it a broader indicator of environmental degradation than emissions alone. Trade openness reflects a country’s integration into global commerce, and gross domestic product stands in for overall economic scale.

The results on carbon emissions are perhaps the most counterintuitive. Across the lower, median, and upper-median quantiles of the arrivals distribution, carbon emissions show a positive and statistically significant association with tourism arrivals. This may seem paradoxical at first, but it is consistent with the idea that in developing and middle-income destinations, carbon-intensive industrial activity and tourism growth often rise together as part of the same expansionary economic process: more flights, more hotels, more energy consumption, and more visitors arriving in lockstep. Yet at the very highest quantile of arrivals, among the region’s most heavily visited destinations, the carbon effect loses statistical significance entirely. Carbon-intensive activity, the study suggests, matters most for destinations seeing low to medium volumes of arrivals, while at the top of the distribution other forces dominate.

The ecological footprint tells a much darker and more uniform story. Unlike carbon emissions, the ecological footprint is negative and statistically significant across every quantile examined. This means that general environmental degradation systematically suppresses international visitation regardless of whether a destination currently receives few tourists or millions of them. The implication is sobering for tourism-dependent economies: while the carbon-tourism link may weaken as destinations mature, the broader erosion of the natural capital that attracts visitors in the first place, clean beaches, healthy reefs, intact forests, breathable air, exacts a penalty everywhere. Environmental degradation, in other words, is not a problem that afflicts only struggling destinations; it is a structural threat that follows an economy up the entire arrivals ladder.

Trade openness emerges as the single most powerful positive driver in the analysis. Its effect is statistically significant across the distribution and peaks at the median quantile, confirming the role of commercial connectivity as a critical engine of cross-border tourism mobility. This finding aligns with a long tradition in the tourism economics literature, including gravity-model studies showing that transport infrastructure and economic linkages facilitate international visitor flows. The mechanism is intuitive: economies deeply embedded in global trade networks accumulate the airports, airlines, business travel, familiarity, and visa-friendly relationships that make leisure travel easier. Business trips seed future holidays, and trade agreements quietly double as tourism agreements.

GDP, by contrast, shows a positive association with arrivals throughout the distribution, but the marginal effect shrinks at higher quantiles. Economic growth fuels tourism most powerfully in destinations that are still building their visitor base; among the region’s tourism giants, additional GDP buys progressively fewer incremental arrivals. This pattern echoes the tourism-induced environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis explored in prior literature, in which the environmental and economic dynamics of tourism shift character as destinations move through different stages of development. It also carries a warning for mature destinations: growth alone will not sustain arrivals if the environmental foundations of attractiveness are allowed to decay.

Methodologically, the study is careful about the pitfalls that plague panel data in environmental economics. The analysis builds on a battery of diagnostic tests drawn from the modern econometrics literature, including panel unit root tests that account for cross-sectional dependence, slope homogeneity tests in the tradition of Pesaran and Yamagata, and cointegration testing to establish long-run relationships among the variables. The Method of Moments Quantile Regression framework then allows slope coefficients to vary across quantiles while handling the heterogeneity that ordinary least squares would average away. The author reports that the distributional differences are substantial enough that a single mean-based estimate would obscure, and in places invert, the true picture.

The policy implications are where the study becomes genuinely provocative. Because the climate-tourism relationship varies systematically across the arrivals distribution, Wu argues that environmental and tourism policy should be differentially designed according to a country’s relative position in the global tourism hierarchy. Emerging destinations with low to moderate arrivals, where carbon emissions and tourism still move together, face a window of opportunity to decouple the two before carbon-intensive lock-in takes hold. Mature, high-volume destinations, where the carbon effect fades but ecological footprint damage persists, should prioritize environmental restoration and carrying-capacity management over sheer growth. And for economies in the middle of the distribution, where trade openness exerts its strongest pull, the evidence suggests that commercial integration and environmental protection are complements rather than rivals: the connectivity that draws visitors is only worth as much as the environment they come to see.

The broader stakes are hard to overstate. Tourism contributes substantially to global carbon emissions, with recent research in Nature Communications estimating the drivers of tourism’s climate footprint, and the sector is simultaneously among the most vulnerable to climate impacts, from coral bleaching to heat extremes. The new findings add a distributional dimension to this feedback loop: environmental degradation does not merely threaten tourism in the abstract, it threatens it unevenly, punishing destinations at every level of development while the carbon-tourism coupling that fuels the problem is strongest precisely where destinations can least afford to manage it. For the ten Asia-Pacific economies studied, and for tourism-dependent nations everywhere, the message is that averages lie. The future of tourism will be written not in a single regression coefficient but across an entire distribution, and the destinations that read their own position carefully may be the ones that keep their beaches, forests, and visitors intact.

Subject of Research: Distributional analysis of how carbon emissions, ecological footprint, trade openness, and GDP affect international tourism arrivals in Asia-Pacific economies from 2001 to 2024

Article Title: Carbon, carrying capacity, and connectivity: Distributional evidence on the climate change-tourism nexus in Asia–Pacific economies

Article References: Wu, C. (2026). Carbon, carrying capacity, and connectivity: Distributional evidence on the climate change-tourism nexus in Asia–Pacific economies. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 157(10), Article 681. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-026-06612-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00704-026-06612-1

Keywords: climate change, tourism economics, carbon emissions, ecological footprint, quantile regression, trade openness, Asia-Pacific, international tourism arrivals, environmental degradation, GDP, sustainable tourism, econometrics

The stakes are enormous. According to GLOBOCAN 2022 estimates, nearly 20 million new cancer cases occurred worldwide in 2022, and China alone contributed approximately 4.82 million incident cases and 2.57 million deaths annually, representing close to a quarter of the global burden. Japan and South Korea face rising cancer incidence driven primarily by population ageing, while Australia reports among the highest age-standardised incidence rates in the world. Many of the region’s most common malignancies, including lung, breast, colorectal, prostate, and gastric cancers, are already amenable to biomarker-guided treatment, with actionable alterations such as EGFR mutations, ALK fusions, HER2 amplification, BRAF mutations, and mismatch repair deficiency now routinely detectable. Yet the authors emphasise that clinical impact depends on effective health-system implementation rather than technology alone.

The four countries were deliberately selected because they embody complementary implementation archetypes. Japan represents a nationally coordinated public model, in which cancer genomic medicine is embedded within universal health insurance through a three-tier network of Core, Designated, and Cooperative Hospitals operating under mandatory quality standards and compulsory molecular tumour board review. South Korea exemplifies a rapidly evolving but reimbursement-constrained system, where next-generation sequencing capacity has expanded quickly across tertiary hospitals and private laboratories, yet comprehensive genomic profiling often requires substantial out-of-pocket payment. China constitutes a large-scale, innovation- and market-driven ecosystem, propelled by public hospitals and a vast commercial diagnostics sector. Australia operates a research-integrated translational framework, in which broad genomic profiling remains largely confined to research programmes even as the country pioneers trial-linked molecular screening.

Each archetype produces characteristic bottlenecks along the patient pathway. In Japan, comprehensive genomic profiling is reimbursed mainly for patients who have exhausted standard therapies, restricting the clinical value of identifying actionable alterations earlier in the disease course. Indication-based reimbursement and limited off-label pathways create a persistent mismatch between genomic findings and treatment access, even though targeted drugs themselves are broadly available. In South Korea, a December 2023 policy revision raised patient co-payment rates from 50 percent to 80 percent for most cancers, further constraining access despite rapid regulatory approval of targeted agents. China has achieved the widest availability of genomic testing, particularly in urban centres, but most tests are self-funded and provincial variation in insurance coverage produces profound urban-rural inequities. Australia captures the paradox in a single phrase used by the authors: right test, wrong access, describing a system where the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme provides broad drug coverage but indication-based rules limit biomarker-driven off-label use.

Molecular tumour boards, the multidisciplinary forums that translate genomic data into treatment decisions, emerge as a second critical determinant. Japan operates one of the most standardised systems globally, with boards convened at all Core and Designated Hospitals and linked directly to reimbursement. South Korea has widely adopted institutional boards, though formats, documentation, and authority vary between hospitals, and boards typically function in an advisory capacity. China exhibits a spectrum of models ranging from academic boards to commercially facilitated services. Australia concentrates board activity in metropolitan research-intensive cancer centres. The South Korean KOSMOS-I pilot study offers a striking demonstration of what coordinated governance can achieve: a nationwide virtual central molecular tumour board spanning 29 sites delivered molecularly guided therapy to 51 percent of enrolled patients between 2021 and 2022, and the ongoing KOSMOS-II trial has expanded the platform to 31 centres with a clinico-genomic database.

Research-integrated ecosystems prove to be the region’s most powerful accelerators. Japan’s SCRUM-Japan programme has enrolled more than 40,000 patients in nationwide genomic screening, and its MONSTAR-SCREEN initiative has conducted 17 investigator-initiated trials across tumour types using multi-omics profiling. Critically, the SCRUM-MONSTAR ecosystem has demonstrated measurable survival benefit: patients receiving genomically matched therapies achieved a median overall survival of 19.1 months compared with 15.3 months for those receiving non-matched therapy, a hazard ratio of 0.767. The accompanying SCRUM-Japan Registry accumulates regulatory-grade real-world data that have even supported drug approvals as external control data. Meanwhile, the BELIEVE/NCCH1901 basket trial, run under Japan’s Patient-Proposed Healthcare Services framework, has enrolled over 290 patients across 18 cohorts, providing genomically guided access to selected off-label agents. South Korea’s K-MASTER programme sequenced approximately 8,000 patients across 55 institutions between 2017 and 2021, while Australia contributes initiatives such as PrOSPeCT, ASPiRATION, and the SUPER-NEXT programme applying whole-genome and transcriptome sequencing to cancers of unknown primary.

Data governance is identified as an emerging strategic inflection point. Japan’s C-CAT platform exemplifies centralised genomic-clinical data collection, complemented by the 2023 Act on the Promotion of Genome Medicine, though interoperability with other national health datasets remains limited. South Korea launched a national cancer clinical and genomic database in 2025 covering roughly 67 percent of cases nationwide, building on the K-CURE project. China operates under the strict constraints of the Personal Information Protection Law and Data Security Law, which are simultaneously driving adoption of federated analytic models that permit collaboration without raw data transfer. Australia has established Genomics Australia, a new national agency finalising the National Health Genomics Policy Framework and Implementation Plan 2026-2030. The authors argue that federated data infrastructures, harmonised standards, and secure cross-border analytic frameworks are essential for building learning health systems while respecting national privacy and sovereignty requirements.

Equity concerns thread through every domain of the analysis. Workforce shortages in molecular pathology, clinical genetics, genetic counselling, and bioinformatics afflict all four countries, reflecting testing expansion that has outpaced training capacity. Geographic disparities persist, from age-related and institutional variation in Japan to the gaps experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and remote communities in Australia. Rare cancers, paediatric malignancies, and patients with uncommon genomic alterations are disproportionately vulnerable because limited case volumes restrict companion diagnostics, specialist expertise, and matched trials. The review also documents divergent approaches to genetic discrimination: South Korea’s Bioethics and Safety Act explicitly prohibits discrimination based on genetic information, Australia enacted legislation in 2026 banning the use of genetic information in life insurance, while Japan and China lack legally binding protections. The authors insist that equity must be treated as a systems-level property shaped by governance and reimbursement policy, not merely a patient-level problem.

Looking forward, the review proposes seven priority actions, from broadening eligibility for comprehensive genomic profiling beyond late-line settings and harmonising molecular tumour board governance, to adaptive health technology assessment, workforce investment, federated data infrastructure, equity-targeted interventions, and structured regional collaboration. Emerging technologies may shift the field upstream: maturing multi-omics platforms, circulating tumour DNA-based minimal residual disease assays, and evidence supporting first-line genomic profiling in untreated metastatic cancers all argue for earlier testing. Artificial intelligence is expected to relieve workforce pressure, with a Japanese national evaluation showing higher concordance between AI-assisted treatment recommendations and expert consensus than conventional molecular tumour board processes. The central lesson, the authors conclude, is that success in precision oncology should be measured not by sequencing capacity but by the ability to connect molecular findings to matched therapies and improved outcomes, a goal that coordinated regional collaboration across the Asia-Pacific could now make achievable at scale.

Subject of Research: A comparative assessment of cancer genomics and precision oncology implementation, access, and policy across Japan, South Korea, China, and Australia.

Article Title: Landscape of cancer genomics and precision oncology in Japan, South Korea, China, and Australia

Article References: Bando, H., Okayama, H., Chang, Y. J., Yu, J., Grimmond, S. M., Kong, S.-Y., Hu, X., Zeps, N., Han, J.-Y., Kim, J.-I., Seguchi, K., Amisaki, M., Sakamoto, Y., Fujisawa, T., Yamashita, R., Kato, K., Kono, K., Johns, A., & Yoshino, T. (2026). Landscape of cancer genomics and precision oncology in Japan, South Korea, China, and Australia. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, Article 101981. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101981

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101981

Keywords: precision oncology, cancer genomics, comprehensive genomic profiling, molecular tumour boards, SCRUM-MONSTAR, health policy, reimbursement, data governance, health equity, Asia-Pacific, targeted therapy, clinical trials