I’ve been a member of EORTC for at least eight years and it was very important to have connection with people and have absolutely amazing projects together. It was very difficult to provide the projects through disease oriented groups but within the group there was absolutely amazing opportunity for Early Career Investigators. But during EGAMs I realised that there are a lot of amazing people around but there was no platform for collaboration, for exchanging our ideas. It was the beginning of thinking about such a platform, together with the board, together with other young investigators, and it’s why we decided to start the program. At the time Alex van Akooi was the representative of the Early Career Investigators on the board, EORTC board, and together with the board, together with McKinsey they prepared an excellent program for us.
Can you describe the structure of the program?
The program was prepared for Early Career Investigators, so about thirty people around Europe were selected to this program. The mission of the program was to create a new generation of oncology researchers who would be able to build trust, build new community and inspire other people and finally be leaders in the future, involved in different EORTC activities. This program had two dimensions: one was related to the EORTC, related to mission, management, different activities, also the partnership with pharma, with other societies. Another thing was more self-development skills; this part was provided by McKinsey, so all topics related to communication, negotiation, self-development. It was absolutely amazing and very, very helpful in our career and daily life.
Can you describe some of the main outcomes from this program?
Because we were divided on different groups and in the first session, because we have five sessions, and in the first session we had to think about topics that we would like to work on within this group. Actually there were three major areas – the first one was the network, internal and external network; the second one is related to scientific strategy, new scientific strategy of EORTC; and the third one was the relationship between EORTC and pharma and other communities. That session started in November 2017, the further sessions were related to industry, related to regulation, policies, European policies etc., but in the meantime we had to also as a group work on our tasks.
One thing that we received a lot of information about the structure, about the roles, about the governing government, about EORTC, the structure of the organisation. Also we had those skills that were necessary to work on the project together through different people from different countries; having this also sometimes very limited.
What benefits has this brought to EORTC and the medical community as a whole?
During the last EGAM, yesterday, we presented the report of the program. As I said, we have those three major topics that was our task, that was our goals to develop. So together as a group we developed a little bit different vision of the network which could be more flexible and more ready for different types of trial that nowadays is very important. So, thinking about our scientific strategy, we would like to concentrate on innovation and optimisation. We found that this is important to go with the trial that can change practice. It’s very important to also use all new technologies that we, right now, have available and then to provide better and more advanced cancer care.
