We do a lot of work with UICC so we have a number of projects together with them but also it’s a meeting which brings together people from across the cancer community. So it’s an ideal place, really, for somebody like the IARC Director to meet a lot of people and to see what ways we can partner in some of our main activities.

What I’m seeing, and I think this is why being at the UICC conference is quite interesting, what we are seeing is a greater political awareness about the importance of cancer even in the low and middle income countries. I think that’s a change and an encouraging one for an agency like ours.

You’ve run ahead of the game in low income countries for years and years and years. Is there still a big part to play?

It certainly is; increasingly we’re seeing the cancer numbers growing in the low and middle income countries but what’s helping us is the recognition from governments that this is actually something that’s a barrier to sustainable development. So they’re interested in addressing the cancer problem whereas previously we were perhaps trying to bring it up from a bottom up approach through research. We’re now seeing the governments needing the kind of information that IARC tries to produce.

So IARC are going to be aiming at the following things in the coming years. First of all we’re really trying to improve, make a step change improvement, in the coverage of cancer registrations. It has been the business of IARC for many, many years but we’re approaching it differently in terms of creating regional centres of excellence that the agency can support but that can then in themselves support registries in the region. We think this will really improve the capacity and the technical support, so that’s one thing.

The other thing we’re moving to is doing much more research to look at the effectiveness of interventions in national programmes. So rather than simply demonstrate in randomised trials that a particular intervention works, we want to study more whether those interventions really work when they’re implemented into the health services.