London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine has unveiled plans for the largest ever study of world-wide cancer survival.

Researchers on the CONCORD global surveillance of cancer survival programme - which is supported by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) in Geneva - hope to collect and analyse survival patterns and trends using individual patient data for 10 major adult cancers and childhood leukaemia from up to 160 cancer registries in 50 countries as part of a £5.5m three-year project.

In 2008, the first world-wide study of cancer survival - CONCORD - was published in The Lancet Oncology with data on two million adults with cancer of the breast, colon, rectum or prostate in 31 countries. Now, the Cancer Research UK Cancer Survival Group at LSHTM has launched a drive to create a consortium of funding agencies to support an extension of the study to establish up-to-date, global surveillance. Under the proposals, CONCORD-2 would expand coverage to add other cancers such as lung, stomach, cervical and leukaemia for millions of cancer patients in up to 50 countries.

Despite the best efforts at prevention, millions of people will be diagnosed with cancer every year for the foreseeable future. Survival rates shine a light on what happens after diagnosis and provide a measure of the effectiveness of health services in a way which data on incidence and mortality alone cannot. But most countries currently have no information on cancer survival to compare the performance of their health system with that of other countries. This programme aims to fill in these gaps in information and monitor progress towards improvements in survival around the world.

Professor Michel Coleman, who leads the Cancer Survival Group, says: "Global inequalities in cancer survival are wide and they represent huge avoidable premature mortality. International differences in survival have helped to drive investment in national cancer strategies in rich countries for more than 10 years and survival trends are now being used to evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies. For most countries, however, no credible, up-to-date information on cancer survival is available. We intend to redress that information deficit."

The creation of the funding consortium is being discussed at a high-level meeting at the School on Tuesday May 17 with leading figures in the cancer field attending from around the world.