15 MAY 2024, DIANA MWANGO, Cancer World
Clinical cancer trials are being run in East Africa for the first time. Diana Mwango asks triallists, clinicians and global cancer leaders what that could mean for improving access to quality diagnostics and care in the region.
Four years ago, clinical trials were little discussed in oncology circles in Kenya. In common with the rest of East Africa, there was no clinical research unit to study treatments for non-communicable diseases such as cancer.
No cancer patient living in Kenya had ever been offered experimental therapies as part of a trial in their home country. Now, for the first time, hundreds are being enrolled in two centres in Kenya; information about recruiting trials in breast, lung and oesophagus cancer clinical trials is appearing on social media platforms, and specialists are hosting medical webinars to promote awareness.
This feels like a game-changer, and for Mansoor Saleh, founding Chair of the Department of Haematology-Oncology, and Director of the Clinical Research Unit at Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi (pictured above), it is long overdue. “Africa has been left behind,” he says. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the odds of surviving cancer – as measured by the cancer mortality to incidence ratio – is around half that in high-income countries. The need for research to begin to close that gap is particularly urgent, he argues, given that cancer is the fastest-growing health threat in the region.
“Our population is growing and getting older. Our diet from healthy farmed food is changing to processed carbohydrates, which contributes to obesity. We are more sedentary and have more exposure to environmental toxins. And there are also the effects of climate change. All these in some way affect our risk for disease and we in Africa need to study patients in Africa who are exposed to these stressors. We cannot use data generated in the West from Western populations who suffer different stressors and have a different genetic makeup,” he says.
Read full article at Cancerworld
Ismailimail 