I came here with about ten of our faculty; it’s really our first time having a major presence at this meeting and it has been very exciting for us to learn about what’s going on in cancer in Africa. We had a session yesterday with our faculty discussing a broad range of activities that we hope will find resonance here and opportunities to collaborate with new partnerships. So we discussed cervical cancer prevention, we discussed cancer genomics, we discussed telemedicine, we also had a talk on multiple myeloma and palliative care will come in today’s session, one of our speakers will be participating in that.

MD Anderson has had a long-standing global engagement, for about 15 years we’ve been partnering with institutions all across the world in what we call the sister institution network. We’ve so far got strong relationships in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia but we haven’t really been engaged in Africa. So a couple of years ago we gathered together a group of faculty with an interest in Africa at our institution and we’ve been trying to understand how we can best engage here. So coming to AORTIC was part of that strategy; we’ve been talking to governments at their embassies in the United States; we’ve been talking to scientists and clinicians in the United States who already work in Africa and on this trip we partnered with the new African Cancer Institute which was just announced at Stellenbosch University, both to do joint research but also to be mentored by them on how to work effectively here. Then we also signed an agreement with the UICC, the International Union for Cancer Control, and again we’re going to be partnering with them to do educational efforts in cancer in Africa. So we’re here to learn, to listen and to partner.

Is the initiative about how to improve cancer care in Africa as a whole?

I think it’s for capacity building so we’ve learned from our conversations over the last two years that that’s really a primary need and of course at MD Anderson we do a lot of education and we have a lot of talented clinicians and investigators who wish to share their time. So we’re trying to understand how those programmes might best be designed to serve local needs. So education is definitely the primary focus at this point.

Which cancers are you focussing on?

We’re going to again take guidance from local experts, from the Ministries of Health that we’ll be meeting with and from physicians at hospitals in country. But obviously what we’ve learned is that breast and cervical cancer are major concerns, as is prostate cancer, so those are some of the things that we’re thinking about as an initial focus.

Which institutes are participating in Africa?

As I said, so far we’ve partnered with Stellenbosch and the African Cancer Institute and then we’re going to be looking which countries to make connections in. One of the challenges for someone coming into this area is that there’s already a lot of activity but sometimes it’s hard to find out exactly where there is still significant need. So that’s part of what we’re relying on the UICC and also the National Cancer Institute’s new information sharing so that we don’t want to go somewhere and duplicate effort, we want to find opportunities that are still out there.