Schedule 2022

According to a recent publication by the WHO-EMRO 2020, cancer is growing at an alarming pace among the Arab nation. The Gulf States and the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) countries show a disturbing rise in the number of cancer patients. Long-term projections show that, by 2030, there would be a 1.8 fold increase in cancer incidence. Breast cancer is by far the most prevalent cancer, making up 49.9% of the total cancers in the region.

It’s a well-known fact that breast cancer is both amenable to screening and curable disease, with a cure rate that exceeds 98% if diagnosed at an early stage. With so many challenges in the region from economic and political instability, a more comprehensive approach to breast cancer awareness and screening is needed, given the fact that we as a region share many cultural similarities. The idea of a PAN ARAB UNIFIED Breast Cancer Awareness Program came to existence 7 years ago, with the leadership of KHCF and FOCP. This annual Arab mass awareness campaign takes place annually in October, and has gained so much momentum and impact. It has reached more than 10 countries that participate on an annual basis, reaching more than 30,000,000 women.

In this session, we will discuss how this UNIFIED approach to breast cancer awareness created a sustainable model and a spring board for many countries, which was challenged on many levels to be able to promote breast cancer awareness in each Arab country every October. Encouraging breast cancer screening and early detection and eliminating many of the challenges facing Arab women in accessing these services has resulted in an increased demand on early detection. Consequently, this leads to the discovery of more cases at early stages, improving health outcomes, and saving more lives.

The purpose of this session is to learn from Prevent Cancer Foundation-funded projects in Peru, Cameroon, and India that are incorporating different approaches to expand cervical cancer screening. We will present on empowering women to adopt new screening technologies in Peru, educating and screening female sex workers in Cameroon to reduce cervical cancer disparities, and using peer education, low-cost approaches, and community partner engagement to inform the national policy in India.

Successful strategies, challenges, and practical lessons learned from these projects funded through a U.S.- based global cancer prevention grants program will be shared with participants. The projects are all aligned with the WHO’s cervical cancer elimination strategy and involve educating community members and health care professionals, utilizing HPV self-testing, as well as expanding access to quality screening and timely follow-up care in low- and middle-income countries. A Q&A session will follow the presentations.

Despite all the obstacles which faced Lebanon and the region in the recent years that were exuberated by the COVID-19 pandemic in all its variants and the measures that resulted in postponing all physical activities, the childhood cancer awareness programs continued throughout the world. Resources, policies, and priorities shift affected the outcome of cancer treatment, diagnoses, and treatments. Related NGOs recognized its negative effect on cancer patients and created many innovative solutions to raise alerts on the action we need to take as community and especially those effected.

The session will give an overview of these efforts from around the world and explore success stories on overcoming the COVID-19 challenges, which are to be inspired by and learned from around the globe.

Prevention, screening programmes, and early detection are the key pillars of the anticancer measures and state policy aiming to reduce cancer burden. Gathering about 200 million of the population and sharing wide borders, the Eurasian countries have the same history and background of cancer care. However, each country follows different paths in both screening policy and early detection. In this section, experts from the Eurasian countries will discuss some main problems, from low coverage to technology used in screenings and early detection, and ways to achieve the World Cancer Declaration’s target: universal access to screening and early detection for cancer.

Understanding how early life exposure to established factors related to increased cancer risk, later in life, offers new pathways for 1) understanding the aetiology of cancer, 2) impacting the global burden of cancer through reductions in exposure to risk factors via effective prevention; and 3) integrating cancer control into public health programmes that can integrate lifecourse research into the wider evidence-base to reduce overall disease burden. Despite this potential, lifecourse research within the area of cancer is still in its infancy compared with research focused upon other diseases. The overarching aim of this session is to give an overview of lifecourse research, with a particular focus on cancer; the panellists will present recent WCRF-funded research related to early life risk factors and cancer risk later in life and identify the opportunities and challenges lifecourse research presents for understanding and preventing cancer and other noncommunicable diseases.

Oral cancer ranks as 5th cancer worldwide in terms of incidence and mortality. The established risk factors are tobacco smoking and alcoholic consumption and, particularly in South-East Asia and the Western Pacific, chewing of smokeless tobacco and/or areca nut-related products. Despite this high burden, screening for oral cancer exists in very few countries. At the most recent World Health Assembly in May 2021, the WHO voted a resolution for Global Oral Health, including reducing the world oral cancer burden.

The IARC Handbook Programme recently evaluated interventions for primary and secondary prevention of oral cancer. Screening can help detect precursor lesions or oral cancer at an early stage and possibly reduce the incidence of invasive cancer and related mortality. In this session, we will discuss several important aspects and challenges related to oral cancer screening: the natural history of the disease, the transformation rate of oral potentially malignant diseases (OPMDs) such as oral leukoplakia, oral submucous fibrosis, and oral erythroplakia, treatment of such lesions, and the potential of clinical and diagnostic methods for oral screening.

Children, adolescents, and young adults (CAYA) with cancer predisposition syndromes (CPS) pose a unique challenge due to their high cancer burden and lack of consistent management resulting in high mortality and long term morbidity. As such, this poses both significant clinical and financial burden on societies worldwide, especially low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The genomic era and international consortia create, for the first time, rapid and robust tools for diagnosis of CPS enabling surveillance and early tumor detection as well as mechanism driven targeted immunotherapies. These advances have led to improved survival and functional outcomes for these individuals. This session will focus on specific advancement in precision oncology which enable increased awareness and implementation of the above in high-income countries (HICs) and LMICs. It is of particular relevance to World Cancer Declaration target 06: ‘Population-based screening and early detection programmes will be universally implemented, and levels of public and professional awareness about important cancer warning signs and symptoms will have improved’ and target 07: ‘Access to accurate cancer diagnosis, quality multimodal treatment, rehabilitation, supportive and palliative care services, including the availability of affordable essential medicines and technologies, will have improved.’

As children who undergo treatment for head and neck cancer survive their disease and advance through life, there is a need for both anticipatory preparation and a perspective on future treatment that is best provided by a multidisciplinary approach to their care. Treatment needs such as surgery and adjuvant radiation therapy carry life-long effects on craniofacial growth and development, which subsequently effects the ability to successfully rehabilitate affected tissues. During this session, a team of Mayo Clinic providers will discuss comprehensive strategies for oral reconstruction that aim to enhance the quality of life for survivors of pediatric head and neck cancers.

Stigma plays a fundamental role in generating and perpetuating health inequities globally. Stigma manifests within all stages along the cancer continuum and remains a key barrier to global cancer prevention and control. Despite the vast advances in the field of cancer prevention and control, cancer stigma is widely understudied particularly in the context of populations from low- and middle incomes countries (LMICs), where its impact on access to effective or quality treatment and care can be detrimental to patient outcomes. Thus, in LMICs, where cancer stigma research is often ignored within the cancer care continuum, there is an imperative need to develop context-specific research approaches to identify and measure cancer stigma and develop/validate and implement effective stigma reduction interventions to improve cancer outcomes. This session will provide attendees an opportunity to understand the impact of stigma on global cancer control, identify and measure stigma, and develop/test context-specific stigma reduction interventions into the cancer care continuum in diverse global settings.

This session will promote the concept that a Breast Cancer Center integrates therapeutic, preventive, and public policy aspects in the region. The purpose of this session is to unify the language on interdisciplinary Breast Cancer Centers is a tool for exchange and progress, particularly in the access and quality of care. Moreover, it will outline a “referral and navigation” process where undiagnosed patients are received from primary care, undergo standardized, quality-controlled, diagnostic testing to achieve a definitive diagnosis; and then either return to primary care (benign) or are referred to tertiary care to initiate cancer treatment (malignant).

By combining those objectives, four of the targets of the World Cancer Declaration will be included: 1) strengthening of health systems, 2) universal access to screening and early detection, 3) improving access to services across the cancer care continuum, and 4) improving education and training of health care professionals.

The goal of this panel is to draw the attention of policy makers, investors, entrepreneurs, regulators, and other critical stakeholders to the need for collaboration, policy formulation and investments to accelerate the growth of AI-powered tools and data systems to address the widening cancer disparities in sub-Saharan Africa and other low- and middle income (LMIC) regions.

This sessions helps to address World Cancer Declaration Target 2 and 7. The use of AI will help democratize access to cancer care services in LMICs, and strengthen the healthcare system overall.

The aim of the session is to create the awareness about how cancer centers integrate and capitalize all cancer research capabilities across institutional boundaries into trans-disciplinary enterprises to foster collaborative research and to enhance cancer treatment, cancer training and patient care both locally and globally. Speakers from two continents will introduce the NCI Cancer Center Program in US and the OECI Accreditation and Designation Program in Europe. They will also provide selected examples of collaborations of cancer centers to foster global cancer research and to expand the training of cancer workforce in low and middle-income countries. This session discusses how cancer centers may serve as a working model to reduce the global cancer burden through joint investment and collaborative partnerships of governments, academic institutions, the private sector, and philanthropy.

WHO – Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) is the WHO region with the fastest increasing cancer burden. Despite the challenging context in most of the countries, remarkable progress has been achieved in building and enhancing cancer surveillance systems. Cancer registries data have played significant role in informing and guiding policies and control plans and in assessing the impact and effectiveness of policy implementation in countries of the EMR, in alignment with  SDG3 health agenda and Target 3.4 on reducing premature mortality from NCDs including Cancer by one third by the year 2030, the World Cancer Declaration Target 2 to measure cancer burden and impact of cancer plans in all countries, and subsequently, Target 1 aiming to strengthening health systems for effective cancer control. Lessons learned on strengthening cancer surveillance systems in EMR are to be shared, in addition to opportunities for future actions and windows for improvement. 

The aim of this session is to discuss the role of health care systems and NGOs in combatting cancer, a successful model for the African countries to be implemented in similar healthcare systems, and the Vision of the Country and future plans.

This session explores the use of the world’s largest health information management platform - District Health Information Software version 2 (DHIS2) - for cancer registration in low-resourced settings. The availability of a no-cost application, that integrates with existing cancer registry software, promotes equity and improves access to high-quality, customizable systems that support cancer registration, and consequently cancer prevention and control efforts, globally.

The purpose of this session is to explore and share successful policies, strategies, and opportunities for collaboration in the identification and treatment of lung cancer. We aim to identify and share the best practice across the countries, which are contributing to improved survival for lung cancer. This addresses World Cancer Declaration Targets 6 and 7.

With key advances in cancer treatment and increasing costs it is essential that we can accurately describe, calculate and compare the probability of relevant outcomes in cancer. This is crucial to support global cancer control activities, deliver health-care services at lower costs, offer better quality and improve the patient experience of the health system.
Prognosis in cancer estimates a probability of an outcome, but there are many factors related to host, tumour, and social determinants of health that affect the outcome. The type of disease and the cancer stage are conventionally the minimum data collected by a population-based cancer registry; however these minimum data fields can be enhanced by collecting additional data that reflects prognosis and outcome so that the resulting knowledge obtained will strengthen the evidence needed to support the appropriate use of scarce health funds.

The aim of this session is to illustrate the importance of prognosis and outcomes in cancer control globally and how the data can be collected on a population basis. We will share the results of our Cancer Registries’ survey and stakeholder consultations and illustrate how the knowledge gathered can be used to improve cancer control and support efforts to reduce disparities in care.

This session closely encompasses the first two World Cancer Declaration Targets, i.e. ‘Strengthen health systems for effective cancer control’ and ‘Measure cancer burden and impact of cancer plans in all countries’.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the global landscape for cancer control with the final impact dictated not only by our immediate response, but also steps towards recovery from the crisis and future preparedness. Drawing on the work of the COVID-19 and cancer global taskforce, this session with showcase through country case studies and research reports the immediate impact on cancer services from prevention, early detection and cancer management, and the learnings we can draw from with respect to the public response and fear of contagions, health workers' stress, and shifts in economic priorities. These will be drawn together in a proposal for emergency preparedness for cancer control to shape recovery, minimising any loss of cancer health gains made in the previous decades and consolidation against future pandemics.

This session has a focus on strengthening health systems for effective cancer control, Target 1 in the World Cancer Declaration Targets.

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated changes perceived positive for an accelerated global cancer control agenda. The non-pharmaceutical interventions such as lockdowns and travel restrictions have demanded innovations for continued clinical service delivery as well as academic and training activities. Some of the changes speak to achieving the 2013 World Cancer Declaration targets that need to be achieved by 2025 namely Target 01 (Health systems will be strengthened to ensure sustained delivery of effective and comprehensive, patient - centred cancer control programmes across the life-course) and Target 09 (Innovative education and training opportunities for healthcare professionals in all disciplines of cancer control will have improved significantly, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)). The maintenance and wider implementation of these changes can be utilised in recovery post pandemic and also to accelerate the pathway to cancer control.

This session will be based on data from a mixed methods study undertaken by the COVID-19 and Cancer International Taskforce.

As we see with the emergence of the Omicron variant in recent days, COVID-19 will continue to challenge health systems worldwide. A critical aspect of the pandemic has been its significant impact on cancer services and cancer patients globally. This session will bring together key leaders from research, cancer control, patient advocacy, and cancer policy to present the latest intelligence on the impact of COVID-19 and how this evidence can be deployed to underpin policy change and deliver robust solutions that mitigate the impact of the pandemic on cancer systems and cancer patients.

As cancer care and control systems have been significantly disrupted globally by the COVID-19 pandemic, an immediate call to action, supported by accurate data and research, would help in reaching the goal set by the World Cancer Declaration of reducing cancer mortality by 2025, focusing especially on Targets 1, 4, 6, and 7.

The aim of this session is to share successful legal and legislative practices related to the field of cancer control in the Latin American region, as well as to present useful information for civil society organizations on the implementation of legal mechanisms for the defense of human rights of cancer patients.

While cures from cancer are goals of moon-shots, affordability of treatments remain a bottleneck for global access. Innovative methods of creating sustainable sources of financial help for non-affording cancer patients can go a long way in realizing the actual potentials of achievable scientific gains. Indian Cancer Society - through the Cancer Cure Fund - has demonstrated a sustainable, replicable, governable model for delivery of care across vast populations. This session aims at disseminating the learnings from this model and bringing together stake holders to help propagate, reproduce, and better the actual deliverables. Use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) for pre-authorizations can help scale the model as successfully demonstrated.

The aim of this session is to emphasize that evidence-based, interconnected solutions directed to larger systemic issues involving public health, population health and clinical medicine must be approached simultaneously in both upstream (prevention, screening and early detection, diagnosis) and downstream components of the cancer care continuum (treatment, survivorship and palliative care) to reduce the burden of cancer.

The concept– “closing the circle”– will be discussed through the strategic implementation of activities with a ‘people-centred’ approach that integrates and coordinates across age groups, curative and palliative medicine, public health and clinical medicine, and location of care (home, community & tertiary/facility-based).

This change can also be envisioned as ensuring individual patients and their families are the focus while encouraging an integrated public/population-health approach to cancer control.

Panelists from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Canada will discuss real-world experience in implementing population-based comprehensive cancer control using the ‘Closing the Circle’ framework, involving curative and palliative medicine, oral cavity cancer screening and early detection, and health system and services policy.

These important collaborations are necessary to help achieve the World Cancer Declaration targets including strengthening health systems for effective cancer control, reducing exposure to cancer risk, and reducing the stigma associated with cancer, access to cancer screening and early detection, services across the cancer care continuum and to pain control.

The aim of the session is to create awareness about the field of global cancer survivorship research and, through examples of ongoing research initiatives from three world regions, to demonstrate the direct linkage between collaborative research and high-quality cancer survivorship clinical care that is designed based on patient input and identification of needs. Access to follow-up care designed from the perspective of cancer survivors, their families, and care providers is limited in low- and high-resource settings. This topic addresses issues around strengthening research training, improving health systems to increase access to services, and addressing the physical, psychosocial, and economic needs of cancer survivors and their families.

In the UK End of Life Care is delivered by a multitude of providers and professionals and is complex with multiple funding streams. Macmillan Cancer Support and Social Finance (a not for profit company) are working in partnership to mobilize social investment into End of Life Care funded by Macmillan as part of the first ever UK wide End of Life Care Fund. Our aim is to enable health and social care systems to make change happen so that people live and die well. There will be some pre-recorded video content from clinicians and teams involved.

The most relevant sub-themes from Theme 4 are:
• Measuring outcomes in palliative care
• Sustainable financing for palliative care
• Implementation of palliative care in resource-limited settings

Access to the benefits of palliative care are not equally available to all citizens, including those citizens of wealthy countries. This session will consider the palliative care needs of different communities experiencing vulnerabilities: Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and people who are in prison. Opportunities to improve equitable access to palliative care for people experiencing vulnerabilities will be explored.

In recent research by our group published in JNCI-CS, we analyzed the text of more than 13,000 articles appearing in two high-impact cancer journals and found that oncology professionals are reluctant to use the word "hope" in their work. This is in sharp contrast to patients and families, who often thirst for messages of hope. In this session, we seek to dispel a myth among clinicians that we believe is responsible for this trend: that “hope” is equivalent to “cure,” and that the experience of hope is thus not available to patients with advanced cancers who may be beyond the curative context. Through reviewing three decades of quantitative research in the social sciences as well as conveying original research in the domain of cancer care, we will present a model of hope that offers a nuanced understanding of the conditions that foster hopefulness in patients regardless of prognosis. In particular, this session will address targets 5 (myths and misconceptions), 8 (distress management), and 9 (education and training of healthcare professionals) of the World Cancer Declaration.

If timely actions are not taken people will continue to die, 8 million people/year. That is almost 22,000 lives per day. 

Reducing tobacco use by 30% will reduce the rate of NCD and thus preventable premature deaths. This session will address how tobacco use is a preventable risk factor. Tobacco control is estimated to have the second biggest impact on achieving the GPW13’s Triple Billion targets and thus reduce the global cancer burden which aligns with the World Cancer Declaration.

The Tobacco industry is relentlessly and ruthlessly trying to undermine efforts of governments to fight the tobacco epidemic. We need to strengthen governments to see and act upon Tobacco industry Interference.

If timely actions are not taken people will continue to die, 8 million people/year. The Tobacco industry is actively threatening public health globally. The aim of this session is to give clear examples of Tobacco Industry Interference in the EMR. The purpose is to strengthen governments (officials) and give them evidence-based tools (along the FCTC and WHO POWER Measures) to assist them in dealing with Industry Interference.

Increasing tobacco taxes is the single most effective and cost-effective to reduce global tobacco consumption and prevent initiation, a key risk factor of cancer (Target 3). Despite the considerable evidence supporting higher tobacco excise taxes, policymakers have been slow to adopt such taxes. This failure is largely driven by concerns about illicit trade, mostly fueled by the tobacco industry and its front groups. This panel aims to dispel myths propagated by the tobacco industry, especially related to tobacco taxes and the illegal market. Studies and new evidence will be shared and discussed, as well as challenges and recommendations.

Around the world, genitourinary cancer patients are working together to become their own best advocates. In this session, speakers from diverse settings will give practical examples of how building bridges between patient organisations have resulted in better outcomes for the international cancer community. This session aligns with Target 5 of the World Cancer Declaration as it reduces the stigma and dispel myths about cancer, as well as Target 7, as it disseminates information about accessing supportive care services.

This session will highlight the critical needs of child, adolescent, and young adult survivors of childhood cancers and their families to identify best-practice tools and interventions available worldwide to ensure survivor wellness. We will address the World Cancer Declaration Targets 1, 5, 6, 7, and 9, thus demonstrating that it is a priority topic of global interest. We will specifically address survivorship strategies to strengthen services across the life course (target 1), reduce stigma and dispel myths (target 5), highlight strategies to improve access to screening and early detection (target 6), and provide direct training of healthcare professionals to better meet the needs of young survivors, especially in low- and middle-income countries (target 9).

The aim and purpose of this session is to describe the development and translation of a consumer-driven prostate cancer survivorship model of care – the Survivorship Essentials Framework. This framework provides a road map for improvements in cancer for men with prostate cancer that can be readily applied in multiple settings, policy and programme initiatives. Importantly, the Essentials Framework supports the survivor as an empowered agent of change and not just the passive recipient of care.

Accessible prostate cancer survivorship care is a critical component of quality cancer care. However, prostate cancer survivorship care remains fragmented with best practice models of care largely undefined. The Survivorship Essentials Framework addresses this gap, comprising six domains that directly influence long-term physical and mental well-being, and are focussed on patient, versus process, outcomes.

This session will demonstrate the impact of the Survivorship Essentials Framework on: improving quality of life (overarching goal of World Cancer Declaration), the application of the framework to strengthen health system provision of patient-centred survivorship care (Target 1), improving access to quality multimodal treatment and supportive care (Target 7), and reducing the stigma of cancer (Target 5).