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Objective 4:
Equal access
To bring about equal access across Europe to standard
care (in both diagnosis and treatment), expertise and
clinical research.
Treating children with cancer is a complex matter, and needs
the expertise of a highly specialised multidisciplinary team.
Across Europe, there is a 10 to 20% difference in 5 year survival,
between countries with population-based cancer registration –
the differences may be much greater where no such outcome
data currently exist. SIOPE led the preparation, definition and dissemination of the ‘European
Standards of Care for Children with Cancer’, and a recent SIOPE survey within the European
Partnership for Action Against Cancer (EPAAC) showed that there is a wide disparity in the
implementation of these standards of care across different European countries [4].
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To accelerate the translation of results from research to clinical care and allow patients to
benefit from new knowledge in a timely fashion.
Actions
1. Strengthen international networks of basic research teams, grouping them by different
cancer types, and improve access to new pharmaceutical compounds for preclinical
research;
2. Enhance interactions between bio-informaticians, system biologists and developmental
biologists;
3. Increase interactions between basic scientists and clinical researchers;
4. Share the clinical-biological data generated by the introduction of technologies that
analyse the biology of specific tumours (such as high-throughput sequencing and other
tumour profiling technologies) between clinicians and researchers;
5. Improve the access of researchers to relevant and high quality clinically annotated
biological samples (including tumour samples, circulating cells, circulating DNA);
6. Increase the involvement of patients and ents in the precision cancer medicine agenda.
Within ENCCA, several networks of tumour researchers that connect basic and translational
research teams with a common interest in each paediatric malignancy have been developed.
THE SIOPE STRATEGIC PLAN
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From AIEOP. Credit Attilio Rossetti photographer, Italy