I would like to share with you some aspects of the ASCO meeting 2022 that, to my knowledge, are a

differential aspect of cancer care and control from a global perspective that is something different and

new in ASCO. Of course, you will have extensive information about new treatments in the plenary

session, a couple of presentations were very impressive, but you can reach all this information very

easily in different platforms and information sources.

I would like to, in particular, share with you a couple of things that, to my knowledge, are the first time

that are discussed in this meeting, not officially, not in the programme, but by people that are leading

important global cancer organisations or regional in two issues. One was access to prevention and

care and, really, this was a fantastic group of leaders from NCI, of course the President of ASCO was

present, many directors, people from Africa, the Middle East, I was representing Latin America. The

issue of really all the knowledge that you, we and the world has here in ASCO applies only to 10% or

15% of the world population. How we can improve the access, more people, better access, more

prevention, less cancer, better care.

Actually, the meeting was quite successful and now there is an idea to follow because most of the

examples that were discussed during this meeting were examples from developed and high-

developed countries – donation programmes from pharmaceutical companies, the Max Foundation

with also support for treatments with acute leukaemia – but these examples are really difficult to

extrapolate to other parts of the world. So the idea at the end of this meeting was to continue the

discussion and try to get new avenues for improving the access and cancer control as it was

discussed with the Union of International Cancer Control, UICC, that is running a new programme

trying to make access more globally facilitated.

The other aspect, a part of this, was the strong presence from the World Health Organisation for the

first time ever, to my knowledge. Now the team led by Dr André Ilbawi, also with the collaboration of

Ben Anderson and other very nice people, they were really doing excellent work partnering and

looking for collaborations and global actions from the perspective of the WHO but having as partners

the local and regional experts trying to really combine in a north-south, south-north collaboration to be

really global and improve many things in a way that could be better adapted to the local regional

needs and really existing resources and cultural differences and things that can make the actions

more effective and reach the patients in a much faster and efficient way.

Thank you very much for your attention.