Asian Oncology Society (AOS) has served as a unified organization of APFOCC (the Asian and Pacific Federation of Organizations for Cancer Research and Control) and ACOS (Asian Clinical Oncology Society) since 2018.
APFOCC executive members and ACOS council members agreed to unify the two organizations during the ACOS Conference, which was held on February, 2018, Thailand.
They have established a vision that by making one big powerful organization representative of entire Asia oncology society, we will be able to increase our academic exchanges among participant countries. And we will be also able to achieve a goal to contribute significantly to the development of cancer research for cancer conquest through our global academic activities.
43 Asian local cancer societies from 14 countries have endorsed AOS and they have recommended 5 councilors and selected 1 board member among the councilors. The constitution of AOS was recognized by the board members during the AOS board meeting, which was held on June, 2019 in Korea and then AOS was established. At the meeting, the board members all agreed to recommend Prof. Yeul Hong Kim to be the first AOS President and then he was elected by the AOS councilors through the e-voting. Prof. Han Kwang Yang (Korea), Prof. Kazuhiro Yoshida (Japan) and Dr. Ying Wang (China) have been appointed as the Secretary general.
The inauguration ceremony was held on October 25, 2019 in Fukuoka, Japan during JSCO 2019 and was initiated by representatives from the participating oncology societies in Asian countries.
As the first step of becoming an international society, AOS had planned to host the first AOS international conference(AOS 2020 Manila) on March, 2020, in Manila, Philippines. However, due to the rapid escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic, AOS 2020 Manila took place virtually on November 27 – December 2, 2020. It was successfully held beyond the time and physical limitations.
We planned to host the AOS conferences annually, but because of the pandemic the conference dates were rescheduled. Now, we are preparing for the second AOS conference, which will be held on June 16 – 18, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea.