International Cancer Patient Coalition shared a post on LinkedIn:
“No Point Keeping Mum: Cairo, BGICC, and the Real Work of Trustworthy AI
Cairo has always been a city where history and ambition coexist. And in the days immediately after the Cairo high-level meeting on trustworthy AI in healthcare, convened alongside BGICC, it offered one more lesson: while the event didn’t bring the mummies back to life, there’s no point keeping mum about the potential of AI to transform health systems, if we’re serious about doing it safely.
What Cairo crystallised is that the AI debate has moved on. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in healthcare. The real test is delivery: how we move from principles to routine clinical adoption without compromising patient safety, widening inequities, or eroding public trust.
Across stakeholders, the same bottlenecks surfaced with uncomfortable consistency. Innovation is not the constraint. Implementation readiness is. Governance often trails procurement. Validation standards are uneven. Bias is acknowledged but not systematically mitigated. Cybersecurity is treated as an add-on rather than a baseline requirement. And post-deployment monitoring, the only way to ensure models remain safe in the real world, is still the exception, not the norm.
This is why the Cairo conversation mattered. It was practical, grounded, and refreshingly intolerant of vague ‘AI-will-fix-it’ optimism. Trust is not built in glossy frameworks alone; it is built in radiology suites, oncology clinics, pathology labs, and primary care settings, where tools must work across diverse populations, be explainable to clinicians, and remain accountable over time.
A key takeaway was the emerging consensus that fragmented approaches won’t scale. Interoperability of standards, shared reference frameworks, and regional capacity-building are now prerequisites, not “nice-to-haves.’ That is where the International Cancer Patient Coalition (ICPC) played a catalytic role: convening voices across sectors and geographies to push the agenda from alignment to action, with patients’ interests at the centre of what ‘trustworthy’ must actually mean.
Equally important: AI and equity are inseparable. Leadership from the IARC – International Agency for Research on Cancer / World Health Organization underscored that data, governance, and deployment choices will determine whether AI narrows or widens gaps in outcomes. And Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu, President-Elect of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), reinforced the wider point: if AI is to serve cancer control, it must be designed for real-world systems, including those with constrained resources, not just the best-resourced centres.
Cairo didn’t resurrect the past. It challenged the present. And it made one thing unmistakable: staying silent on AI is no longer neutral. It’s a choice, and healthcare can’t afford it.”
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