• Kenya has not been able to conduct liver cancer surgeries due to their delicate nature, lack of expertise and specialised equipment to handle the surgeries.
• The project will be implemented in the North Rift and will be centred at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital.
Kenya will soon be able to conduct liver cancer surgery after the state entered into a partnership to train medical specialists.
The two-year project will see a team of experts travel to Peru for one-month training. After returning, Peru surgeons will visit the country to train them on how to handle the job based on the equipment available.
The team comprises two surgeons, two technicians, physicians who deal with liver conditions and oncologists.
Kenya has not been able to conduct liver cancer surgeries due to their delicate nature, lack of expertise and specialised equipment to handle the surgeries.
The project will be implemented in the North Rift and will be centred at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital. It will be supervised by the National Research Fund, the French Institute for Sustainable Development, the Institute of Pasteur and the Peruvian National Cancer Institute.
It will be funded by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the Solidarity Fund for Innovative Projects.
The aim is to improve monitoring of hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common primary cancer of the liver, in Baringo, Uasin Gishu and Elgeyo Marakwet counties.
The three counties were selected based on referral system cases for liver cancer and chronic liver diseases.
“We have not been able to do it because of the risks involved. The therapy mostly is surgery but it is quite delicate because liver is a single organ and hence the need to be very careful,” Dr Fatma Some said.
Some is a specialist physician at Moi University. She will be supervising the project which is estimated to cost Sh60 million (€516,148).
“The liver has a lot of blood supply so the surgery is very delicate. It needs specialised equipment which we are lucky we will be able to acquire through this project,” some said.
Through the project, 200 patients will be investigated during the two-year period.
“We will identify the patients we feel either have risk factors or already have chronic liver disease or liver cancer. Then we will investigate them based on those new laboratory techniques,” Some said.
“These will help us to identify the common risk factors in our set-up and subsequently give us an opportunity to screen them for cancer and to continue following them up. In the event they are suggested that they are developing cancer, they will be put on treatment.”
Hepatocellular carcinoma is ranked third worldwide in mortality.
In 2020, there were 905,667 new cases and 830,180 deaths globally.
In Kenya, HCC is the 11th most common cancer and the ninth cause of cancer death.
Risk factors associated with HCC include chronic hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV), excessive alcohol consumption, exposure to dietary toxins such as aflatoxin B (AFB1) and metabolic liver disease, particularly non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
These risk factors are considered preventable. Surveillance and early detection increase the chance of potentially curative treatment.
However, surveillance is substantially underutilised, even in countries with sufficient medical resources.
“The idea is to develop a kind of model that can be replicated in other counties and for this, we will ask that Kemri do the evaluation of the project so we can see what worked, what did not work and then after that it will be up to the Ministry of Health to decide whether or not they want to enhance it to the rest of the country,” Dr Mathieu Guerin said.
Guerin is the deputy head of cooperation and attaché for science and Higher Education at the Embassy of France in Kenya.
Edited by A.N