Fourteenth Annual Meeting of National Cancer Institute Directors (NCID 2019)
August 26, 2019
The fourteenth annual NCID meeting took place in Lyon between 10-12th July, 2019. There were 125 attendees from 65 countries at a wide range of resource. The meeting celebrated the Tenth Anniversary of the establishment of the International Prevention Research Institute. A film was made to acknowledge this anniversary and is available on this iPRI website.
The main meeting was preceded by a half-day meeting of delegates from Africa working together on a ‘Pathways of Care’ project in collaboration with iPRI. The meeting of African delegates this year was used as a platform to launch the ‘African Code Against Cancer’. We continue to develop a Prevention Campaign and a Policy document for Oncology in Africa. This continues with publication of a series of articles ‘Cancer Control in Africa’ which will be published on Thursday 25th July, 2019 (www.ecancer.org).
There was a presentation celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam National Cancer Hospital. This Institute has made a huge contribution to Cancer Control in Vietnam and is providing leadership not only in Vietnam but also in surrounding countries. The creation of the Indochine Cancer Consortium (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and iPRI) is focused on Cancer Prevention: prevention of disease and prevention of death in patients with the disease. There is a project underway to look into the distribution of Cancer in Indochine and to investigate the Pathways of Care in determining how patients reach major hospitals for diagnosis and treatment. The Governments involved wish to extend this collaboration to Chronic Disease in general.
A special mini-symposium was included in the programme on the subject of Lung Cancer. State-of-the-art practices in Epidemiology, Diagnosis, Treatment and Screening were presented. Recent developments in this area have been quite remarkable in recent years. This was followed by a presentation of blood-based cancer screening which demonstrated remarkable possibilities.
There were presentations on a number of hot issues of general importance including: evidence-based recommendations for population-based screening were clearly presented emphasising the strong evidence favouring screening for colorectal cancer and cervix cancer; the lack of evidence of the involvement of specific foods and nutrients in the aetiology of cancer; announcing the newly established ‘Academy of Oncology of Central and Eastern Europe’; Presentation of mortality trends from cancer, Cardiovascular Disease, COPD and Diabetes in all countries of Europe and the Americas; Pathways of Care in Australia and Africa; and, Cancer in Myanmar.
There were a number of developments and sub-meetings during this meeting.
There was a meeting of the ‘Alliance of National Cancer Institutes’ which has been established at these meetings. The group is planning to conduct effectiveness studies of cancer therapies in collaboration. As an initial study, it was agreed to establish a Clinical Breast Cancer Register involving large centres in a variety of countries.
An initial meeting took place to discuss ‘The Value of Cancer Care’: this will focus not only on economic issues to examine value in its broadest sense. This will involve representatives of the Industry, Patients’ Groups and iPRI academics.
The fifteenth annual meeting will take place between 15-17th July, 2020.
