Shushan Hovsepyan: Prof. Eric Bouffet will share his insights and his experience in pediatric oncology.
Professor Eric Bouffét: Thank you. Thank you very much. I can see me and I’m not very clear on the picture, but I hope that you see my face.
It’s a wonderful day today, a day of advocacy, a day of celebration of success, but a day also where we should share with other people that there is so much to do, so much more to do. And, you know, this is something that we don’t always realize when we start our career.
Now, I don’t want to say I have completed my career, but I have retired. So what does it mean? It means I’m now a free person, and I try to do as much as I can do with the experience I’ve accumulated over the years.
I had the privilege to be the president of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology, and during my time as president, as I said, I had the pleasure just to initiate the global mapping.
I also was at the United Nations at the time the Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer was launched. So it was really a vibrant, at time, vibrant presidency. And I really enjoy every minute of it.
Now, on my side, I’m a pediatric brain tumor specialist, and, you know, I was working in Toronto. My mission in Toronto was to build a pediatric brain tumor program, and I did my best just to develop a team. And this team has been pretty successful and my colleagues have done a wonderful job. But at the same time, you realize that brain tumor is a field where there is so much needed, just not only to cure, but also to look at the quality of cure.
And so this has been my focus and I’ve been working. I’m still working, doing clinical trials just to try to improve the outcome of children with brain tumors. But on the other side, I started in 2003, in fact, to work with people in low and middle-income countries. And then this is an eye-opening experience. You realize that, yes, there is a lot to do at your place, but there is so much to do in these places.
And with this, we decided just to develop some training program to have some partnership, people say twinning, some people don’t like the term twinning, but it has been a wonderful experience and currently with the team in Toronto, but with many other partners, we have collaboration with a number of centers, a number of countries, with Malaysia, with Indonesia, with Vietnam, with Pakistan, with Iran, with Jordan, with Lebanon, with Ukraine, so and with South America, with China.
So all of this came progressively and with this we could have an impact by bringing some, you know experience some information, just trying to help people to implement things in their own place. But this is not enough. As Mitei said, what we need also is just to treat and to bring treatment here. And, I have been of the last few years, I had the privilege just to be a principal investigator in a number of clinical trials.
And with this, you are in touch with drug company and drug company when you approach them and you talk to them about low and middle-income countries, at first they push back and they say that’s not our field, but progressively and it’s coming they start just to realize that there is something to do.
And there are a number of initiatives that are going on, and we are starting some clinical trial in India, in Pakistan in Jordan, the country I mentioned in Turkey, in Egypt. So it’s very, very exciting to see what’s going, what’s happening.
And I think I have a lot of, you know, as you can see, I have a lot of passion, but a lot of hope that this will happen and this will be the next step.
And in addition, I want to say I have also the privilege to, be the chair of the allocation committee of the foundation S, which has a my Child Matters program. And this program is incredible. this program is sponsoring the global mapping, but it’s also a program that has multiple branches.
And for example, recently there was a call for application for a project called Home Away from Home. And this is under My Child Matters and CCI, the Parents Foundation and and the topic of the project was the building of houses close to the hospital in low and middle-income country.
And I tell you, I read this project, I was crying. Every single project was absolutely fantastic. And it was very, very difficult to make a decision and to make a choice.
The result will be announced in a few weeks. But, I tell you, all of this is absolutely fantastic and we can see that there is a lot of support and a lot of things that are going on.
