World Cancer Day

February 4th, is World Cancer Day, and the 2022 theme is "Closing the Care Gap." What exactly does that mean?

It's all about understanding and recognizing the inequities in cancer care. It’s about having an open mind, challenging assumptions, and looking at the hard facts.

In the childhood cancer community, it is widely known that there is a long-standing inequity in developing cancer treatments for children compared to adults. According to ACCELERATE, an international forum whose steering committee includes our own founder Dr. Susan L. Weiner, just 24 new anti-cancer medicines have been approved for children over the past 15 years vs. over 150 for adults.

Dr. Weiner recently spoke in detail about this inequity in our Conversations Series, noting that legislative achievements like the 2017 RACE for Children Act are helping to close the gap:

"Hopefully the RACE Act will shorten the time between the first time that a drug is really evaluated in adults and the time it is evaluated in kids. Right now, it can take as long as nine years, which is relatively short compared to where it was 20 years ago. But still to have a gap of that length is unacceptable."

Accelerating childhood cancer research and the development of new treatments is one of our top public policy priorities. Urging drug companies to test targeted therapies earlier in kids has been a goal for Children’s Cancer Cause since our founding in 1999.