Washington DC, 25th October 2024
Local and global
The ICPC meeting explored how best practices might be deployed to impact the cancer crisis, not just in the more prosperous territories of the USA and Canada, but globally.
Cancer remains a major disease, and even in the most prosperous regions of the world the awareness is often low of how innovation can combat this scourge more effectively.
The emphasis at this meeting was on how personal and professional engagement can rise to the challenge that cancer presents, ensuring the forces of medicine and society are combined most effectively.
It featured Vivek Subbiah, M.D. Chief, Early-Phase Drug Development, Sarah Cannon Research Institute, Nashville, TN and ICPC board member, who emphasised how preventing, diagnosing and caring for the millions afflicted with this disease can change the future for so much of the world’s population.
“My professional experience of disease in the poorest and richest countries of the world has taught me that cancer is not an inevitability, and that joint action by people of good will can shift the policy dial to give ever-wider populations the chance of escaping the worst ravages of cancer“.
Asal Sayas, who was a Senior Advisor for Cancer and Infectious Disease in the Executive Office of the President at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, spelled out the impact that better understanding, tied to better funding, can transform the health prospects around the world by promoting wider and more effective use of the advanced tools and approaches that technology now offers in combating cancer.
ICPC on the road
This was the first regional meeting of the International Cancer Patient Coalition since the launch of the coalition at the United Nations General Assembly earlier this month.
The White House meeting, where ICPC was represented by its secretary general Denis Horgan, was a roundtable discussion on the potential generation of a Global Cancer Fund, convened in the context of the Biden Cancer Moonshot.
The aim is to build on the success of transformative global health programs and harness the collective efforts of governments, private sector leaders, non-profits, and international organizations towards ending cancer as we know it.
Building on the Moonshot initiatives in the Indo-Pacific and multimillion commitments in Africa, the White House meeting underlined the unique opportunity that exists to catalyze support for a global effort to address cancer comprehensively.
The goal of the Biden Cancer Moonshot remains to expand access to life-saving cancer prevention, detection, treatment, and care in low- and middle-income countries.
A Global Cancer Fund is seen as a key mechanism to stem the growing burden of cancer before it becomes a health, humanitarian, and economic catastrophe.
Renewed commitment
ICPC shares the Moonshots’s conviction that the world urgently needs a renewed commitment to cancer prevention, treatment and care, and a recognition that the opportunities to overcome the growing challenges exist largely both within most recent developments in cancer care, and in the promotion at social and policy level of a new commitment to act on the new possibilities.
ICPC espouses a “whole-of-government” approach that focuses on the patient and maximises the potential of new technologies and insights to eradicate inequalities in access to cancer knowledge, prevention, diagnosis and care, and delivers improved health outcomes to patients.
Mobilising the collective power of the international collaboration to drive change to the benefit of the global citizens, it offers a clear path for actions that will support, coordinate and complement countries’ efforts to reduce the suffering caused by cancer.
The ICPC event focused on the political framework in tackling cancer, highlighting how cooperation can add value in prevention, early detection, diagnosis and treatment, and quality of life of cancer patients and survivors.
“Now that ICPC has come into being, it will focus on research and innovation, tapping into the potential that digitalisation and new technologies offer, and mobilise institutional support,” said Horgan. “It will enable expertise and resources to be shared across the world – supporting countries, regions and cities with less knowledge and capacity. It will help researchers to exchange findings between countries and to access crucial health data on the potential causes of cancer and promising treatments.“
