Responding to the challenges of international collaborations between the east and the west - report of the first JCOG-EORTC symposium and a perspective from young JCOG and EORTC investigators.

International/intercontinental collaboration is necessary to set up new innovative clinical trials for cancer treatment. However, the infrastructure, especially Asia-Europe academic partnerships, to enable such collaboration has not been fully structured and differences and similarities between the research groups have not been well studied. In 2015, collaboration started between the biggest cancer research organizations in Asia and EU, Japan Clinical Oncology Group (JCOG) and European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC). Following the first pilot collaboration study, the first scientific symposium took place in December 2017 in Tokyo. Before the symposium, a working visit for EORTC investigators from the Early Career Investigator initiative (ECI), willing to develop projects within the JCOG-EORTC partnership, was held. In addition to the digest of the working visit and symposium, we aimed to describe the differences and similarities between the two groups and to identify key factors for collaboration from the perspective of the young investigators of the networks. These findings are described in this article.