This year it was a great success; we have registered about 3,500 attendees or participants from all over the world. We have about 90 international speakers from different areas. So the slogan of ‘One World Against Cancer’ is really applicable on this distribution, geographical distribution, of all the international speakers. Also one of our aims is to colour the event so we have people from Africa and other participants from India, from Singapore, from China, from Russia and from the United States and also from Europe and, of course, from the Middle East and from Egypt. So this is very, very important to go for a platform that may help later for improving the education and also improving the research activity. So we can use this enthusiasm in collaboration and the presence of those people to go for a research platform for later clinical trials, proposals and other things like this.

How has the conference improved since last year?

One of the main changes from last year is that we added the translational research part. It is very important to go for the educational part in the clinical activity and the clinical research activity but very, very important to enhance the translational part. So this year we have a huge translation part in collaboration with the United States, with Russia, with China, in drug discovery and in the molecular part. Also we will go for hands-on workshops post-conference activity in Ain Shams University Medical Research Centre that will go for training of the people about next generation sequencing, mutation detections and other things like this. It is very, very important to go for capacity building of the personnel to go for the era of translational research that helps later for improving the citation, ranking of the Egyptian institutions.

What do you hope the conference will achieve?

One of the main objectives of the conference is to educate the young generation and also to enhance the interrelationship and the communication between all the countries. The other thing is to improve the learning curve of the participants to be at the international level. So every year by this gathering and by these very important talks that may collect the world leaders in this subject, this helps a lot to enhance the standard of the cancer management in all the participants and also help, as we just said, to be the platform of new proposed clinical trials involving all the regions in the world including the Middle East, Africa and also the East – Russia, China and other countries.

Why is Egypt such a good place to have the conference?

We have 100 million population and also we have now a very, very good, safe atmosphere so it is very important. Cairo is now the heart of Africa and the Middle East. Also we have a lot of advances in oncology management in comparison to the other areas in the region so it is very important to gather all in Cairo but we are very happy to collaborate, to be in any place in the world. So I think there is no barrier; I think that it’s very important to have people from all areas and Cairo usually has, from 7,000 years before, accommodated all to be inside this beautiful country.

What are your hopes for the future of the conference?

It is a very, very important question about the vision for the future for this conference. We just discussed this last night with most of the KOLs in the world that we want to go for our next generation dream to have this conference as a platform for research and to have better and de novo research that will be published inside the conference for the first time from the region and that to be like the nucleus of new clinical trials and more collaboration between our society and the international societies. We have this year a closed meeting with the Breast International Group to try to enhance the research activity inside Egypt and the region. We have all the representative societies from the region attending this meeting.

Why is it so important for all of these countries to be represented at a conference like this?

Because cancer is a worldwide problem, it is not dedicated to one country. It’s very, very important to know the geographical distribution even in the genetics so it is very important to collaborate. As we know that cancer in China is slightly different than cancer in the Middle East, is slightly different than cancer in the West, and if you go to the statistics you find that even in breast cancer we have less incidence of breast cancer in Egypt but higher mortality than the Western countries. So it is very important to compare why this outcome is different even in different places and different countries. This may help in more drug discovery, more targeting the treatment to different genetic oriented treatments.

What is your overall message from the conference?

I want to welcome all to Cairo and I think that it is important to collaborate. If we will collaborate we will win the war against cancer.