This conference was designed to create synergy between beneficiaries of the EU, EEA & Norway Grants and National Funding Programmes, facilitating the connections and networking between researchers and stakeholders towards reaching the overall goal to improving the people lives through prevention and better treatments.
During two days the attendees had the chance to discuss the newest and disruptive findings within the collaborative research projects. Also they had the chance to identify and exploit the common points of interest in order to develop new partnerships and to accelerate the transfer of technologies/results from lab to market by capitalizing the upcoming calls and initiatives from Horizon Europe & EU Cancer Mission.
Conclusions:
Why is it important to invest in improving cancer research and what should be invested in, in order to improve research in this field, are two major questions at the end of the conference, addressed to researchers facing the issue "what is possible in the future"? We all understand that investment comes first, the main thing is to establish what we invest in and to understand the order of importance: understanding, diagnosis and treatment, prevention, increasing quality of life. All of these are closely linked: understanding is the most important aspect, being closely linked to prevention, diagnosis and treatment in order to increase the quality of life.
On the other hand, the participants agreed that understanding should not only be seen as important for researchers, but also for citizens! The European Commission asks for the impact of research on society and how to solve the real problems. The impact of research on society must be considered: to make people’s life better and to expend the limits of knowledge. Currently, the main aim of the research is publication. This mind set of the researcher needs to be changed from publishing in high ranked journals to patient orientation, to the impact of the research on society. A society approach will determine the researcher to start from the citizen and society needs and not doing the research they were used to.
It is important to increase the collaboration between oncologists and researchers in other fields. It is a lack of interaction, there is no interdisciplinary between different disciplines. This solution, which is practiced in the USA, has led not only to the understanding of the disease, but also to the development of new therapies, with results in detection and prevention.