Department of Pathology at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital Launches National Projects to Transform the Entire Cycle of Cancer Care

The research team of Professors Jun Kang, Hyun Lee, and Younghoon Kim from the Department of Pathology at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, Catholic University of Korea, announced on the 23rd that they have all been selected for the 2026 Individual Basic Research Project supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea, and will officially begin their respective studies. The total research funding amounts to 1.6 billion won, and it is the first time that three professors from the same department at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital have been simultaneously selected for national research projects during the same period, demonstrating the hospital's recognized research capabilities in pathology at the national level.

Although the three research projects cover independent topics, they ultimately aim in a single direction. Professor Jun Kang's research focuses on predicting "when cancer will recur" before surgery, Professor Hyun Lee's project addresses "how to reconstruct the excised area" after surgery, and Professor Younghoon Kim's work aims to determine "which patients will respond to immunotherapy" before treatment. In essence, the Department of Pathology at one hospital is tackling the entire cycle of cancer care—preoperative prediction, postoperative reconstruction, and prediction of treatment response—all at once.

Research team of professors Jun Kang, Hyun Lee, and Younghoon Kim from the Department of Pathology, Seoul St. Mary's Hospital. Seoul St. Mary's Hospital

The first project, led by Professor Jun Kang, seeks to answer the longstanding clinical question: "How much should be removed during cancer surgery?" This study, which investigates the risk factors for recurrence of the rare breast tumor known as "Phyllodes Tumor," has been selected as a core project in the Individual Basic Research Program.

Phyllodes Tumor is a rare tumor, occurring in less than 1% of all breast tumors, but even those diagnosed as benign are known to recur in about one out of ten cases. If the tumor becomes malignant, it can metastasize to other organs, making it crucial to determine the extent of normal tissue to be excised around the tumor, a process known as setting "resection margins." However, there has not yet been a clear standard for how wide the excision should be to prevent recurrence.

Based on previous studies, Professor Kang hypothesized that "tissues already transforming into cancer" remain around recurrent tumors. In this new project, he plans to scientifically verify this hypothesis by using "microdissection-based next-generation sequencing," a technique that isolates only cancer cells under a microscope for genetic analysis. The ultimate goal is to identify patients at high risk of recurrence in advance and to establish more precise criteria for surgical margins.

The second project, led by Professor Hyun Lee, addresses the issue of reconstructing tissue defects left after cancer surgery. Selected as a core project in the Individual Basic Research Program, this study focuses on the regeneration of soft tissues—such as skin, fat, and fascia—that are inevitably removed during tumor excision.

In surgeries for head and neck cancer, breast cancer, and sarcoma, soft tissue defects inevitably occur, leading to both cosmetic deformity and functional impairment, which are major obstacles to patients' recovery of daily life. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 19 million people are diagnosed with cancer annually worldwide, and a significant portion faces challenges with tissue reconstruction after resection surgery.

Currently, the main methods are autologous flap surgery, which involves grafting tissue from another part of the body, or the insertion of artificial implants, but these approaches have risks such as donor site damage, infection, or the need for additional surgery. To address these issues, Professor Lee's team is investigating the use of messenger RNA–lipid nanoparticles (mRNA-LNP), a technology utilized in COVID-19 vaccines, to induce the body to produce the proteins needed for regeneration directly at the injury site. In essence, this represents the field of tissue regeneration, where injections prompt the body to self-repair damaged tissue.

The third project, led by Professor Younghoon Kim, aims to determine in advance whether "immunotherapy will be effective for this patient." This project has been selected as a young investigator study in the Individual Basic Research Program. According to the National Cancer Information Center, gastric cancer ranks fourth in cancer incidence in Korea and, as immunotherapy has recently become an option even for advanced gastric cancer, the research is expected to have a significant impact.

Immunotherapy drugs, which are changing the landscape of cancer treatment, work by activating the body's immune system to attack cancer cells. However, only a portion of patients actually benefit from the treatment, and there is still no sufficiently accurate way to predict which patients will respond.

Currently, responsiveness is estimated using tests such as PD-L1 protein expression or microsatellite instability, but these methods often lack predictive accuracy. Professor Kim's team intends to develop a model that precisely evaluates histological diversity within gastric cancer tissue using artificial intelligence (deep learning)-based digital pathology analysis, and applies this for the prediction of immunotherapy response. The research is based on the idea that tumor heterogeneity may influence immunotherapy outcomes.

These three newly selected projects not only address unmet needs in current cancer treatment, but also demonstrate the rising status of pathology in the era of precision medicine. Pathology is being recognized as a field that goes beyond diagnostics to directly designing treatment strategies.

Professor Aewon Lee, head of the Department of Pathology, stated, "For a long time, the Department of Pathology has supported clinical practice at the frontlines of diagnosis. Now, however, our role is shifting to participating from the stage of designing treatment strategies. These three projects are the starting point for realizing that shift through concrete research, and we expect that the Department of Pathology at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital will make a meaningful contribution to establishing itself as a central hub for precision medicine research in the future."

Meanwhile, Seoul St. Mary's Hospital was the first in Korea to introduce a digital pathology system in 2019. Since 2021, it has operated the CODiPAI (Collaborative Digital Pathology Artificial Intelligence) project group for five years under the support of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Through this, it has built a database of more than 160,000 digital pathology slides for cancer and established Korea's first and largest cloud-based digital pathology platform, continuously strengthening its cancer research infrastructure. The simultaneous selection of these three projects is seen as recognition of this diverse research capability.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.