Treatment approaches for pancreatic adenocarcinoma, an aggressive disease with poor prognosis, are evolving beyond cytotoxic chemotherapy. Recent advances in RAS targeting with small molecules are redefining therapeutic paradigms.

As China's cancer burden continues to rise and treatment becomes increasingly complex, clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are crucial to standardising cancer care and supporting clinical decision-making. Over the past decades, China has made substantial progress in developing oncology CPGs, transitioning from expert consensus and international adaptation toward domestically led guideline production.This Policy Forum presents an analysis of the optimisation and implementation of oncology CPGs in China. We argue that the core challenge facing oncology CPGs in China is not a lack of guidelines, but the absence of an integrated governance and implementation ecosystem, and insufficient alignment with local evidence.By situating China's oncology sector within a macro-health-system perspective, this Policy Forum provides a conceptual blueprint for other transition economies experiencing a mismatch between rapid clinical technology scaling and fragmented regulatory governance.We propose a four-part strategic framework: (1) Establishing a national joint clearinghouse and registration system; (2) integrating resource-stratified pathways with locally relevant evidence; (3) expanding free, diversified dissemination channels; and (4) embedding implementation science alongside healthcare financing alignment.Addressing these systemic gaps offers scalable lessons for global health systems aiming to transition from the quantity-driven expansion of clinical guidelines to equity-oriented, system-integrated quality enhancement.

Breast cancer treatment using systemic therapies has often focussed on remission and survival, but can cause severe side effects that negatively impact patient quality of life and function, sometimes with limited clinical benefit. In the era of precision oncology, one of the greatest opportunities may not be in identifying more patients for treatment, but rather in identifying those who can safely receive less to avoid overtreatment.

Sudden cardiac death in the young is often due to silent inherited cardiac conditions. Although evidence increasingly supports cardiac screening as a preventative strategy, policies and frameworks differ globally. Structured screening frameworks that utilise AI-enabled technologies show great potential for enhancing disease detection and risk prediction.

The 2026 WHO guidelines recommending doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (doxy-PEP) represent the first global antibiotic prophylaxis recommendation for bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs), with provisions for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) monitoring.Doxy-PEP should be governed as an adaptive intervention subject to periodic, transparent review, but establishing decision rules faces challenges.Doxy-PEP is expected to select for resistance, including in Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Staphylococcus aureus, and the gut and skin microbiomes; the scope of clinical consequences is incompletely understood.As STI prevalence falls, the benefit per dose declines while the AMR externality per dose is expected to grow, shifting the cost-benefit balance in ways that vary across populations and settings.Attributing changes in disease prevalence or resistance patterns to doxy-PEP is methodologically difficult, given incompletely understood and complex drivers of pre-existing trends, surveillance limitations, and heterogeneous uptake, raising questions about study designs, data sources, eligibility criteria, and governance mechanisms.A full accounting of benefits and harms is broader than reduced bacterial STI incidence and AMR. Benefits include consideration of patient-centered outcomes such as reduced anxiety regarding STI acquisition, avoidance of repeated treatment visits, and fewer STI-related complications. Harms include drug side effects, such as gastrointestinal adverse effects and concerns about use in pregnancy.

Current risk equations miss many cardiovascular events in people classified as low risk. Prediction is simultaneously advancing on two axes: broadening predictors toward molecular omics, and expanding outcomes toward earlier subclinical atherosclerosis and later heart failure.