‘Cancer Prevention Must Move From Thought to Reality’

WASHINGTON—"Cancer prevention now requires that we move from thought to reality," said Carolyn Aldigé, founder and president of the Cancer Research Foundation of America (CRFA). "This mean a new paradigm of the health care system, rather than just taking care of sick people. Treatment of advanced disease has less impact than prevention."

The Foundation has sponsored the Cancer Prevention Working Group, which has spent 2 years framing the issues and outlining challenges, she said at a meeting of the Working Group. "Now we need to formulate an action plan to take concrete steps. We must engage regulators and the primary care community and convince them that prevention is important," she said.

Ms. Aldigé said that such a plan could be devised within a year, taking the best current practices and research and weaving them into a broad cancer prevention approach.

She called for a summit meeting in the interim to deal with specific issues and barriers, especially questions of approval, regulation, and liability. The keys, she said, are further research to identify chemopreventive agents and devising ways to provide incentives to the pharmaceutical industry.