Molecular Oncology: Towards a Cancer Mission in Horizon Europe

06 November 2019

References: Anton Berns¹,², Ulrik Ringborg²,³, Alexander Eggermont⁴, Michael Baumann⁵,⁶, Fabien Calvo⁴, Angelika Eggert⁷, Carolina Espina⁸, Douglas Hanahan⁹, Denis Lacombe¹⁰, Francesco de Lorenzo¹¹, Simon Oberst ¹²,¹³, Thierry Philip ¹³,¹⁴, Joachim Schulz ⁸, Joseph Tabernero ¹⁵ and Julio E. Celis ²,¹⁶

Ever since former Commissioner for Research Philippe Busquin established the European Cancer Research Area (ECRA) in 2002 to address the fragmentation of cancer research in Europe, the cancer community and policymakers have been trying to develop strategies to bridge the gaps between basic/ preclinical and clinical research and research and healthcare (Celis and Pavalkis, 2017). These efforts culminated in 2014 with the creation of Cancer Core Europe (Eggermont et al., 2019), a patient-centered legal structure on therapeutics that currently consists of seven large cancer centres (mainly Comprehensive Cancer Centres (CCCs, institutions that link research with the healthcare system; Saghatchian et al., 2008) across Europe.

Inspired by the Cancer Core Europe initiative, a consortium of 10 cancer prevention centres was recently established – Cancer Prevention Europe – to reinforce the complete cancer prevention research continuum (Wild et al., 2019). At present, Cancer Core Europe and Cancer Prevention Europe are in the process of integrating their strategies to create a coherent plan for prevention, early detection and treatment, and efforts are underway to engage the outcomes research geometry and to network with other infrastructures, CCCs, and research and clinical centres across Europe (https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/18780261/2019/ 13/3).

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