3 cancer patients linked to same research facility

A renowned hospital in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, said on Wednesday that three people who had studied at its breast cancer research facility have been diagnosed with cancer this year, in response to online reports that several staff members got cancer due to the lab environment and reagents used.

In a post released around 2 am on Wednesday, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University said that its breast cancer center's laboratory has strictly adhered to lab safety rules since its launch in 2005.

The causes for individual cancer cases are extremely complicated and the hospital welcomed third-party institutions to conduct evaluations and investigations at the lab, it added.

According to the post, a female doctor who studied at the laboratory as part of her doctoral degree program from 2017 to last year and worked at the hospital's breast surgery department after graduation in July of last year, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last month and is now in stable condition after surgery.

Another doctorate graduate who had experience at the laboratory from 2013 to 2018 and now works at the breast surgery department was diagnosed in June with synovial sarcoma — a rare type of cancer that often occurs near the knees and other large joints. He underwent surgery and is recovering.

The third person worked at the laboratory as a visiting student from a hospital outside Guangzhou. The person finished their studies in April last year and was diagnosed with breast cancer this year.

"No students currently working at the laboratory have cancer," it said.

The post added that the breast cancer center's laboratory was put into operation in 2009 and more than 200 students have worked there.

"The laboratory has always strictly abided by management regulations, and all lab workers have gone through pre-experiment safety and standardized operation training," it said.

The hospital, which was founded in 1835 and later renamed after Sun Yat-sen, who studied there, is a top-tier hospital directly managed by the National Health Commission, the top health authority of China. It has over 5,400 staff members, 3,000 hospital beds and handles 3.02 million visits each year.

Suspicions emerged about the laboratory after several screenshots of a WeChat chat history began circulating online on Monday evening, saying that as many as six students at the hospital's breast cancer research facility were recently diagnosed with cancer.

Questions have been raised over why so many students from the same lab suddenly fell ill to cancer around the same time, why these cases were rare and extremely deadly cancer types, and whether their conditions were associated with the type of research carried out at the lab.

China reports around 4 million new cancer cases each year, with an estimated incidence rate of 294 per 100,000 people, according to the National Cancer Center.