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Turning the Stockholm Declaration into reality: Creating a world-class infrastructure for cancer research in Europe

Hannah Brown

Europe needs to be better organised. That is the now-unanimous conclusion of the continent's cancer community, after years of debate about possible ways to tackle bottlenecks and barriers in research. A process of review and analysis of the situation in Europe, begun in 2004 by then-EU Commissioner for Research Philippe Busquin, has provided a concrete proposal to focus the frustration shared by all. But to move this plan forward and smooth the flow of new treatments and diagnostics from laboratories to patient care, scientists are having to learn some political lessons.

The movement now absorbing the cancer-research community started with a project funded out of Europe's last framework programme—the main mechanism through which EU centrally held research monies are distributed—to identify the barriers hindering cancer-research advances. Dubbed the EUROCAN + Plus project, the 4-year-long analysis, which published its final report this year (EurocanPlus, 2008), considered all aspects of research funding, organisation, infrastructure, and coordination in Europe. “The main outcome of which,” explains EUROCAN participant and Molecular Oncology editor-in-chief, Julio Celis*, “has been to structure the cancer community in a way that hasn't been done before.”

However, it took a determined group of cancer research professionals representing 16 of the largest and most successful cancer centres in Europe, to come up with a solution to EUROCAN's many grievances. Outlined in a document labelled The Stockholm Declaration (Ringborg, 2008), these cancer leaders proposed an innovative platform for translational research in Europe to link large comprehensive cancer centres (CCCs) and basic/preclinical cancer centres across the continent in a network to produce the critical mass necessary to deal with increasingly complex biological and clinical questions and harmonise methods, infrastructure, and regulations to make cross-border investigation less burdensome. The platform is expected to support the cancer “dream teams” of the future.

To read the full article which appeared in Molecular Oncology please click here

*Julio Celis is EACR President Elect

 

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