World Cancer Day: Closing the care gap

Cancer is a devastating disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It can strike anyone, regardless of age, gender, or social status, and has the potential to change lives in an instant. However, with increased awareness and early detection, many cancers are treatable and even curable.

New treatments for cancer are being developed every day, and many people, including my colleagues here at the European Medicines Agency, make it their mission to ensure promising medicines reach patients.

Last year, cancer medicines represented, once again, the largest therapeutic area amongst the treatments recommended for approval by EMA: 25 new cancer medicines. What’s more, roughly 51% of those contained an active ingredient never approved in the European Union before.

We saw significant innovation for the treatment of conditions like multiple myeloma, leukaemia, lymphomas, biliary tract cancer and paediatric brain cancer. Many more extensions of indications of medicines already on the market brought advances for melanoma, lung cancer, prostate cancer and breast cancer.

This year's World Cancer Day theme is about advocating for more universal access to cancer treatment. And I’m proud to say EMA (and the European Commission) have taken this challenge onboard.

In 2023, EMA decided to focus on cancer medicines as a pathfinder to further support the approval of treatments which could have a meaningful impact in transforming patient care, including by applying the learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic. This focus will continue during 2024.

Cancer itself was chosen as it is an area with a great amount of research and development, that nevertheless still sees many unmet medical needs: the needs of patients with no effective treatments for advanced primary disease, or disease recurrence, the needs of special populations, like children, the needs of patients with rare forms of cancer. Closing the care gap for these people is the heart of the initiative.

The ”Cancer Medicines Pathfinder” is based on three pillars: accelerating the assessment of those cancer medicines which have the potential to make a difference, strengthening multi-stakeholder dialogue and international collaboration, and making sure the benefits and risks of cancer medicines are better explained and communicated to patients and healthcare professionals.

To achieve this ambitious goal, we are working with the stakeholders involved in the development process: industry, academia, but also the healthcare professionals and the patients.

In December 2023, academics and EMA experts published an article in the European Journal of Cancer which describes the attitudes of healthcare professionals and drug regulators about progression-free survival as efficacy endpoint in clinical trials with patients with advanced cancer (https://www.ejcancer.com/article/S0959-8049(23)00798-0/fulltext)

This is only one example of how EMA has tried to capture the knowledge coming from stakeholders in the field of cancer. Regular workshops are being organised as part of this dialogue. On 12 January, EMA and the European Organisation of Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) organised a multi-stakeholder workshop on soft tissue and bone sarcoma addressing how we can develop new treatments in ultra-rare sarcomas, as a model for ultra-rare tumours.

On 1 February, FDA and EMA collaborated to set up a Conversation on Cancer to hear from patients whose lives have been transformed by therapeutic and regulatory innovations. And if you are interested in following more events, on 29 February, EMA and EORTC will collaborate again to discuss how patient-reported outcomes and health-related quality of life data can inform regulatory decisions.

World Cancer Day is a reminder of how important this work is and that we all have a part to play in supporting cancer patients and survivors and closing the care gap.