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ISOPT CONGRESS - JUNE 2026

Day Two: ISOPT Annual Meeting

Jun 13, 2026 Hong Kong
The 2nd Annual ISOPT Congress features world-class speakers discussing: 1) initiatives to reduce cancer mortality in Europe, Korea, and China, 2) the global cancer burden; 3) advances in neoadjuvant therapies for lung, colorectal, breast, and melanoma,; 4) multidisciplinary management of gastrointestinal, breast, and lung cancers; 5) principles for cancer prevention and early detection of colorectal, gastric, and lung cancers, and 6) the cost-effectiveness of nasopharyngeal cancer prevention and early detection.
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Cancer Risks and Initiatives to Reduce Cancer Mortality

The Global Cancer Burden: Present and Future Projections 18:25

The Global Cancer Burden: Present and Future Projections

Leslie Mery

There were 20 million new cancer cases and close to 10 million deaths in 2022, and the burden is set to rise 75 percent by 2050. Les Mery of the International Agency for Research on Cancer o...

There were 20 million new cancer cases and close to 10 million deaths in 2022, and the burden is set to rise 75 percent by 2050. Les Mery of the International Agency for Research on Cancer opened with the message worth holding onto: four in ten of those cancers are preventable.

Speaking on behalf of IARC, the WHO's specialized cancer agency in Lyon, Mery walks through the 2022 global burden data by age, sex, and world region, then explains how the estimates are actually produced. Cancer is already a leading cause of premature mortality across most of the world, and Mery makes the case that the tool underpinning every one of these numbers, the population-based cancer registry, is still missing in most countries. He closes on why measuring the problem is the precondition for controlling it.

Key points for clinicians:

  • The 10 most common cancer types account for about two-thirds of global incidence and mortality. Lung cancer leads at 2.5 million new cases (12.5 percent of the total), with female breast cancer close behind at 2.3 million, followed by colorectal and stomach.

  • About one in five men and one in five women develop cancer in their lifetime, based on 2022 estimates. Roughly one in nine men and one in twelve women die of it.

  • Breast cancer accounts for about a quarter of all new cancers in women. Leading types shift by region: lung dominates parts of Asia, cervical cancer dominates much of Africa.

  • Breast cancer shows a striking inversion. Higher-incidence developed countries (France through Norway, where roughly 1 in 10 women are affected over a lifetime) carry among the lowest mortality, while lower-incidence countries carry some of the highest.

  • For the working-age group of 25 to 54, IARC estimated just over 4.5 million new cases in 2022 for both sexes, with Asia accounting for nearly 60 percent, then Europe, then Africa.

  • The data infrastructure is thin. About one in three countries has high-quality incidence data and only about one in four has high-quality mortality data. IARC's estimates rely on high-quality registry data where it exists (methods 1 and 2A) and inference from the most reliable nearby data where it does not.

  • Cancer Incidence in Five Continents (CI5), begun around 1965 by Sir Richard Doll and colleagues, grew from about 29 countries and 30 registries in Volume 1 to 104 countries, 670 registries, and 812 populations in Volume 12. The GICR program, launched in 2012, works through six IARC regional hubs to build registry capacity worldwide.

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