Healthcare is a team sport: Tackling cancer inequalities in Europe

Throughout history, great scientific advancements have been made through collaboration. While the narrative of the ‘lone genius’ is prevalent in our society, the truth is that science is a team sport.

Without contributions from multiple people around a shared challenge, significant advances may have never been made. One thinks of the huge collaborative effort of the international Human Genome Project, spearheaded by Dr Francis Collins, MD, PhD, but only achieved by a truly vast collaboration across the world; or the crucial correspondence between Georges Lemaître and Albert Einstein, which led to what we now call “The Big Bang” model of the universe. These are two examples among a litany of advances for which collaboration was central to success.

Nowhere is this more true than for those of us who work in healthcare. Intricately connected to a multitude of factors, including societal demographics and economics, addressing the challenges of population health requires input and effort from across the healthcare ecosystem. This includes the field of oncology, where social deprivation, obesity, ageing, and healthcare expenditure, among other factors, play a major role in determining population-level cancer outcomes.

The scientific and clinical community, including the pharmaceutical industry, plays a major role in creating new opportunities for progress in healthcare. Looking specifically at oncology, we have seen astronomical advances in our understanding of the biology of cancer, leading to the advent of personalised and immune therapies – achieved through collaboration across the public and private sectors. This was clearly evident at this year’s ASCO Congress, which was brimming with the fruits of collaboration in oncology research.

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