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Denis Horgan: Taking our cancer campaign to the White House

Denis Horgan/ecancer.org

Oct 29, 2024, 17:50

Denis Horgan: Taking our cancer campaign to the White House

Denis Horgan, Executive Director from the European Alliance of Personalised Medicine (EAPM), shared on LinkedIn:

“Taking our cancer campaign to the White House

WASHINGTON, 28 October 2024: In preparation for a key strategy meeting at the White House on Friday October 25th, top US experts on Friday morning synthesised priorities for cancer action in the North America region.

We organised this pre-event to the White House discussion on a Global Cancer Fund.

Local and global

The meeting explored how best practices might be deployed to impact on the cancer crisis, not just in the more prosperous territories of 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 accent 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, 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’.

The White House meeting 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.

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

We shared 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.

Mobilising the collective power of the international collaboration to drive change to the benefit of the global citizens.”