The Challenge

Cancer is a critical public health problem in Africa. Increases in the life expectancy, changes in diet and lifestyle and lower burden of communicable diseases promise to increase the cancer burden in the future. According to the American Cancer Society, the five year survival rate for breast cancer is less than 50% in Gambia, Uganda, and Algeria, compared to nearly 90% in the United States.

Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs)

Non-communicable diseases are the leading cause of death in Sub-Saharan Africa with cancer at the forefront. Increases in life expectancy, and lower burden of communicable diseases will increase the cancer burden in the future. Lack of access to diagnostics contributes by under reporting existing cases.

Cancers diagnosed in Africa are associates with a higher mortality than other regions of the world due to limited availability of screening, laboratories and pathologists. For example, in Malawi there are only a handful of pathologists serving a nation of 17 million people.

Without diagnostics, clinicians are unable to effectively screen for cancer, diagnose disease and develop care plans. Patients are lost in the process, disease goes undetected and clinicians feel ineffective and frustrated. This results in the majority of cancers not being diagnosed until they reach an advances stage of disease.

Affordable cancer prevention and control using standard approaches, such as tissue biopsies for breast cancers, are cost prohibitive for patients and are not supported by the existing healthcare infrastructure. As a result, the majority of patients enter the care system with advanced disease that is not curable, making palliative care the only option. Sub-Saharan countries simply lack the personnel, training, resources and infrastructure needed to respond to the cancer challenge.

The Opportunity

Opportunities for reducing suffering and death from cancer must focus on the development of an economical, scalable, secure and reliable cloud-based infrastructure to register specimens, record findings and disseminate them to clinicians who can act.

The American Society for Clinical Pathology calls on the Office of Science and Technology Policy to help mobilize partners, resources and expertise to develop and administer a technology-based diagnostic solution.

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