January 30, 2025 5pm London UK time

Speakers:

Prof Bethany Shinkins (Chair)

Prof Peter Sasieni

Dr Hilary Robbins 

Prof Sian Taylor-Phillips 

There is a real appetite across the cancer community – from the public to policymakers - to accelerate the adoption of novel technologies that promise to aid earlier cancer diagnosis, reducing future deaths from cancer. Achieving ambitions to reduce late-stage cancer diagnosis is reliant in part on our ability to implement new tests and innovations in cancer screening programmes. However, a major and pressing barrier to their effective adoption and patient benefit is the generation of timely and robust evidence required to underpin decision-making. The goal of any screening programme should be the reduction of future cancer deaths, but its impact takes time to measure. Promisingly, there’s some consensus that “surrogate endpoints” may help to enable decision-making, by providing alternative, more obtainable and immediate measures to assess the viability of new screening programmes. There are critical and outstanding questions within the research community on the suitability of these surrogate endpoints. Questions include should policymakers and health systems consider implementing new screening technologies before they receive proof of mortality reduction? How should the advantages and limitations of testing for cancer early be communicated to the public? Who should be accountable for these decisions? Is further modelling informative? 

In this shared Cancer Research UK and Consilium Scientific webinar, experts in cancer and screening will discuss their different views on the use of surrogate endpoints for earlier cancer detection, addressing what is the current state of evidence in relation to different surrogate endpoints?  Where is there already consensus on criteria that a surrogate endpoint needs to meet to reliably indicate a meaningful improvement of cancer outcomes?  What must be done – and with whom - to achieve further consensus and drive progress in screening for earlier cancer detection? 

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