Prof. Sano is a council member of the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association and Secretary General of the International Gastric Cancer Association (Figure 1). He is the committee chair of the JGCA treatment guidelines. He is a founding editor of the journal Gastric Cancer and serves as reviewer for several international journals. He is the Department Director of Gastroenterological Surgery, Cancer Institute Hospital, Tokyo. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo in 1980, and completed his surgical training at the First Department of Surgery, University of Tokyo. He spent 15 months in Paris from 1986 to 1987 as a research fellow of the French Government Scholarship at Institute Curie. He worked at the National Cancer Centre, Tokyo for 16 years, and has been in the present post since 2008.
