What does it take to bridge the gap between researchers and patients? In this episode, scientists, oncologists, and patient advocates from Canada, the United States, and across Europe share their perspectives on fostering meaningful collaboration between patients and researchers and why it matters for the quality of research. We also explore various established models for incorporating patient perspectives, and how these frameworks are shaping the way patients engage with the research process.
This episode has been adapted, with permission from the panellists, from the open forum discussion at the EACR-OECI Conference on Patient Involvement in Cancer Research, a virtual event held on 28 October 2025.
Our guests in this episode
- Marta Puyol, Scientific Director at the Spanish Association Against Cancer Scientific Foundation
- George Sflomos, Scientist at EPFL, Switzerland
- Terri Conneran, Patient Advocate at KRAS Kickers in United States of America
- Tanja Spanic, President of Europa Donna, Slovenia, and President of the European Breast Cancer Coalition, Europa Donna
- Robin Urquhart, Associate Professor in Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Canada
- Juan-Jose Ventura, Research and Patient Engagement Director at Cancer Patient Europe in Belgium
- Marianna Vitaloni, Medical and Scientific Project Manager at Digestive Cancers Europe in Belgium
- Ines Vaz-Luis, Medical Oncologist and Researcher at Gustave Roussy in France
- David Chuter, independent patient advocate from the UK
- Sophie Postel-Vinay, Clinician, Scientist, and Medical Oncologist at INSERM in France
Listen here, scroll down for the transcript and subscribe now via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music/Audible, Deezer or YouTube so you’ll never miss an episode. You can find all episodes and their transcripts here.
Our host is Dr. Alexandra Boitor, EACR Scientific Manager.
Episode transcript
Alexandra: Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 31 of The Cancer Researcher Podcast, brought to you by the European Association for Cancer Research. This episode features the open forum discussion from the EACR-OECI Patient Involvement in Cancer Research Conference. You’ll hear from a range of scientists, oncologists, and patient advocates from Canada, the United States of America, and several European countries.
You will hear from Marta Puyol, Scientific Director at the Spanish Association Against Cancer Scientific Foundation; George Sflomos, Scientist at EPFL, Switzerland; Terri Conneran, Patient Advocate at KRAS Kickers in United States of America; Tanja Spanic, President of Europa Donna, Slovenia, and President of the European Breast Cancer Coalition, Europa Donna; Robin Urquhart, Associate Professor in Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Canada; Juan-Jose Ventura, Research and Patient Engagement Director at Cancer Patient Europe in Belgium; Marianna Vitaloni, Medical and Scientific Project Manager at Digestive Cancers Europe in Belgium; Ines Vaz-Luis, Medical Oncologist and Researcher at Gustave Roussy in France; David Chuter, independent patient advocate from the UK, and Sophie Postel-Vinay, Clinician, Scientist, and Medical Oncologist at INSERM in France.
The discussion focuses on how collaboration between patients and researchers can be promoted in order to strengthen research outcomes. It starts by looking at the importance and challenges of sharing medical data and biomarkers for collective learning, before focusing on how to establish meaningful research and patient advocate partnerships.
Taking into account the barriers that can exist between researchers and patients, the importance of ensuring genetic and socioeconomic diversity amongst patients involved, and factors that may influence patient participation in general.
Different existing models of taking patient ideas into account are discussed, highlighting how these approaches can influence patient engagement in research.
The episode also includes some practical tips and calls for action for both patients and researchers to help move these efforts forward. I’ll leave you now with Marta and George who moderated the discussion. Let’s dive straight into the conversation.
Marta Puyol: How can the scientific community make sure that patients with rare or newly discovered biomarkers feel seen and included in research conversation?
Also, we know a lot about KRAS, but now they’re also raising new biomarkers that we may not know anything about. There might not be any drugs and, how can they do to really bring themselves into the conversation? Terri, I see you there that you’re going to comment.
Terri Conneran: I think that’s an excellent point, and I think they’re going to be the future. What’s happening right now is that patients are starting to see that the biomarker that’s driving the cancer, the genomic mutation of it, we’re leaning into that and we’re breaking through those silos. So it’s not just the organ of origin, and we’re looking at that. That’s how we ended up with so many different rare cancer types in our KRAS groups. Ironically, what ends up happening is because KRAS can either be wild, mutated, or amplified, that means every person belongs in the group in some manner or shape or form. And because they’re finding that information, they’re getting connected with other people around it. So I think that one in three people, we’re still not even hitting the group of people that need to be helped. If you’re not hitting the majority, the minority is gonna be even farther out. And so once we start getting that groundswell and a little bit more energy around it, I think it’ll happen in and of itself because we’re being so intentional about including all levels of it.
When I say diversity, I don’t always mean by socioeconomic. I mean by mutation diversity. And I think that’s where we’re starting to go because we’re gonna start looking at what it is we are underneath a genomic family tree.
Marta Puyol: Thank you very much. Just one, it’s more like thinking a little bit out loud. At least in Europe there’s a lot of talking about the right to be forgotten. How do you see this balance between the patient’s right to be forgotten and the importance of sharing medical data, biomarkers and collective learning?
Terri Conneran: Well, I think right now there’s so much that’s happening so rapidly, for everybody. And it’s still gonna boil down to a personal opinion. And the truth of the matter is, we’re all people and we’re not gonna all do it right. And I didn’t really care anything about my genetics until all of a sudden I have the cancer and then it was a problem.
Is there a right to be forgotten? [00:05:00] Absolutely. But as AI and those sorts of things are starting to come online, I think that there’s gonna be a lot of clarity that’s gonna start happening around it. And so we’ll be forgotten in our own way, but we’re gonna wish that we could just delete our email address because once I give it away, it’s gone forever.
To expand on that, a little bit more practical steps. How can I be forgotten if I want to leave a legacy? And so it’s a conflict within each individual as well, that goes above and beyond the scientific or the data and those types of things. And I think that that’s one of the underlying problems.
And so once we kind of reconcile those two issues, it’ll happen a little bit more naturally.
Marta Puyol: I like that. Tanja also wants to elaborate on this question.
Tanja Spanic: Yes. I just wanted to edit about the right to be forgotten and the current topic in Europe is that your experience and cancer diagnosis does not discriminate you, especially in a field of access to financial law, loans and life insurance.
After certain time of years. So after the diagnosis, the insurance companies and banks are obliged not to take into account your medical history. Your diagnosis, all the data stays in your medical record. No one erases nothing from anywhere but insurance companies and banks should not take this as a higher risk or give you unequal financial resources.
It’s not a discussion, right, to be forgotten about your sharing data or any mutation or whatever. But it’s just about your diagnosis and discrimination, especially in financial services, social services like adoption, because in Europe, even now you need a certificate that you’re healthy and so on. It’s not a question of deleting anything from your medical records.
Marta Puyol: We have talked a little bit about AI and how this is going to work with patient advocates, especially maybe in communication and in the language barrier, but at the end of the day, the people that use computers and AI, they are of a specific group of people. And do you think that this is maybe going to help in some areas, but it’s going to broaden the gap with some minority groups, or do you think that this is going to be an advantage all the way?
Terri Conneran: It’ll be both. I mean it from a practical standpoint, if you’re building stairs and you’re trying to make them level all the way through, you’re not necessarily gonna see every little nook and every little cranny as you’re kind of going through them.
And so there’s gonna be knots in that pine as it’s built, and it’ll settle in. I think where we are beginning right now is truly just the beginning and what we’re looking at with AI is gonna look like dial-up does to us today pretty quickly.
As the information’s getting out there, it’s gonna be a matter of better controlling of legitimate information. We’re all suffering through Doctor tiktoks and Instagram reels and Facebook. When you get diagnosed with anything or even have a headache and put something on Facebook, everybody’s got a cure for you. So I think that there’s always gonna be the, like, human level of wrong, but we’re going to be getting a little bit better in other ways.
I’m excited to see how it’s going to bridge those gaps between the two areas.
George Sflomos: I wonder is Professor Robin with us? Maybe you can give us also your insights about if we can use some indicators or metrics that can be used to evaluate the meaningful engagement and meaningful research advocate partnership in more, I would say not quantitative way, but just more solid.
Robin Urquhart: That’s a great question around evaluation. We developed the framework as an evaluation framework with the idea that it would be a common, at least minimal sort of framework, to help teams or organisations be able to essentially develop their own indicators with respect to whatever domains are most important for that project or most important for that organisation.
So the idea would be we’d have some sort of an adaptable framework for evaluation, highlighting or pointing out the important domains, as decided by patients, and patients who are involved in research and health research, this was around not just cancer, but health research.
Then allow teams and provide some guidance around teams. I say teams, it could be an organisation, to look at those domains and to again, co-create indicators. That then they could monitor over time to see how they’re doing with respect to patient and public involvement and engagement.
So we’ve been trying to operationalise that. I’m sort of the science lead of patient engagement of a research unit that crosses multiple provinces in Canada. So that would be like multiple states in the US right? We are all around patient-oriented research and building capacity. We have a big pool of about 50 or so patient partners that work very closely with us, whether that’s in training or whether that’s in capacity development with research trainees. All different sort of governance, all different areas.
So actually I think it was almost exactly a year ago, we brought together all of our patient partners. Myself and a patient partner led a day workshop to go through that framework and actually to work together on what the priority areas for evaluation were.
That was the first part, identifying together the priority areas and then actually developing indicators, so that we can monitor those over time. And so that was about a year ago, and we have established sort of those indicators around making people feel welcomed and engaged in the process.
And we developed a number of indicators that we now have built into our evaluation so we can monitor those and actually reflect on them over time.
It’s multi province, so a lot of our work’s virtual, but yearly we get everybody together for two days or so in the same set of rooms where we can sort of reflect on those. Within that organisation, there’s someone with evaluation expertise to help evaluate many parts of what the organisation does, this is just one.
We co-designed those together to see what fits best using these framework indicators, both qualitative and quantitative, because it was very important to patients that we have both.
George Sflomos: This is a fantastic framework, really excellent effort, congratulations. Tanja, you have a comment, I see your hand.
Tanja Spanic: Yes, I just wanted to add that we actually use this Canadian model for BIG (Big Against Breast Cancer) when we started the PPI (Patient Partnership Initiative), because we have also one of the members. It’s a global initiative, so we have a member from Canada.
So when we were starting and having the first workshops, we actually used the Canadian model and then we learned about an Australian one also. So it’s really the thing that we don’t have to go from scratch. There are so many already available resources, and also in the research community, a lot of organisations that already started at those documents are publicly available. You can just go read it, find what works for you, and you just have to start.
George Sflomos: That will be a fantastic resource. I don’t know if there is any other open question that we didn’t answer. Yes, please Robin.
Robin Urquhart: There was a question around diversity mentioned by a lot of the speakers. If anyone has any advice or experiences of engaging with or involving underrepresented groups in research.
I’m gonna just bring up one example from Canada, which I really like. We are challenged just like I think lots of folks across the world in terms of diversity and representation in research, in terms of people with lived experience.
And we’ve had a number of evaluations that are published across the country in a number of areas that show that many of our patient partners are very similar. Retired, women, largely white. Just very similar in terms of their experience and their demographics.
There’s an example, out of Ontario actually. It’s out of Women’s College Hospital. It’s called E-M-P-A-C-T. It’s essentially this hospital, to sort of inform their research work, have developed a panel of patients from underrepresented communities.
So a very diverse panel, and a panel that actually the community that they serve. So this panel is sort of a standing model. It’s not that people go into the research teams or go in to become embedded in the research teams. It’s a little different. It was designed that way for a reason, thinking about the burden on people and the time and everything like that.
But what they do is, all of the research projects that go through this hospital right now, it’s an academic hospital. All the research projects, which are largely patient-oriented and clinical and so on, they actually have an opportunity, actually the panel can say we wanna talk to you. And so they reach out, the research projects come in, they present in front of the panel, and the panel questions them on representation and diversity and equity and says, have you considered this? Have you considered maybe some unintended consequences of the work you’re doing? Have you considered how recruitment strategies might actually bias you towards maybe white, middle-aged folks? Whatever, right? It’s won a number of awards now, certainly nationally and perhaps internationally. And I think here in Canada we see it as an exemplar. A leading practice in terms of organisations and health researchers in terms of actually making sure that our research projects from the design phase, at least, are really trying to make sure that they are designed with equity, diversity, inclusion, and so on, from the very beginning.
It’s essentially a standing panel. It stands for Equity Mobilizing Partnerships in Community, and it’s at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. Anyway, one example where the hospital I think has really stepped up to make sure that all the research that they conduct and they support really does have this built in from the very beginning.
George Sflomos: Excellent. I, dunno, Martha, if you?
Marta Puyol: Just a short question. What advice would you give to an early career researcher who really wants to improve how they communicate and how patients can participate into their own research? Someone that’s starting to lead, what are the main points that they have to follow?
Robin Urquhart: I would say don’t be afraid. We’re all people. We all hopefully have the same goal in mind, which is helping people through cancer.
Researchers go into the research I think because they’re probably pretty curious, but they also really wanna make an impact and really wanna help people.
And so, I think, don’t be afraid. There’s lots of resources out there and lots of organisations that can help you train sort of patient partners and that sort of thing. At the end of the day, my experience is, this is all about relationships, which is no different than anything else in the rest of our lives, I think, right?
And so, I try to be genuine. I try to meet people. Often if we’re meeting in person, this is gonna sound funny, you know, this is a Canadian context. I usually walk with folks to the bus stop or to the bus station and stand there and like chat for a few moments, or we’ll find time for coffee. So I do think a lot of it is about building relationships, because there is a lot here around trust.
I think that Terri, you said it really well. Like you knew nothing about research and you’re stepping into this thing that’s so different and not within your comfort space. Whereas me as a researcher, I’ve been trained in it, so it is in my comfort space, right? So sort of recognising that and just building relationships.
Terri Conneran: Recognise that we’re more scared of you than you are of us and I mean that from the heart. One of the things that I’ve learned to do, because I didn’t know to do this as a patient, as an advocate, is when I’m coming in to meet people, if it’s a one-on-one conversation and we’re not doing some big, huge presentation, I’ll actually tell them “Hey look, you’re in a safe space. Don’t worry about patient-friendly language because I’d rather that you say it and we can figure out how to articulate it and get it right in writing later.” Don’t get stuck up in your head. And I mean that from the kindest, most maternal way I know how to say that. That’s kind of one of the most important things that you need to realise. When we’re going out and I’m having a conversation with you, get me to the conclusion and what’s going next and then walk me back and let’s learn this together. And so you are becoming my professor in this little cancer moment.
Alexandra: Next Juan-Jose Ventura and Marianna Vitaloni shared their views on how to improve communication between researchers and patients.
Juan-Jose Ventura: We have found normally when we get in contact with researchers that have never been engaged with patients into their projects. The problem is that they don’t know how to get patients involved into that because they don’t know how to contact. They don’t know which channels that they can use to reach patients. And I think that is a problem that we as patient advocates, we have to contribute to solve. We can get that information, provide that initial contact to researchers and especially new researchers, to start this connection that can bring patients and researchers into something that can be a dialogue and then a trust. The problem is that there are two different worlds and they don’t know how to jump into each other.
Marianna Vitaloni: If I may add, a first good step could be to reach the local, or the European or in the US or Canada, patient organisation and really establish this relationship. As Robin was saying, we are also people and creating the initial relationship is the key to creating new projects, new initiatives together.
Marta Puyol: I was also wondering, there are little spaces where patients and clinicians can talk and discuss and co-create, but there is no space where researchers and patients are close together and they can really build something.
Is this a space that we can build where researchers and patients can establish this relationship? Apart from getting in touch with those local organisations. There’s a real physical barrier between researchers and patients. How do you feel about it?
Terri Conneran: I think there’s two parts to this. One part is it’s a good idea to have a little bit of a barrier, because you can’t really be scientific if you see mum there and you realise that’s what’s going on. And at the same time, being able to get connected through it.
I think that through the labs that I’ve seen, when the PI is getting out there and getting involved, they’re starting to see the different organisations beyond just what’s within the course of your reach. And the whole question that you posed here is essentially what I was aiming for from the very beginning for the KRAS Cancer Connect. To be able to kind of connect that energy, to break down the silos.
I am like a bull in a China shop, I just don’t believe in silos. I believe we should be breaking through them and circling back, and that’s the only way we’re going to break through and so any way that we can all be joining forces around that. And I think it’s gonna go beyond just like EACR, or to the European community. This needs to be a global initiative and it needs to be more of a collaboration.
And so I’m hoping that we can take this sort of conversation and use some of the people that are in here that can really make this come to fruition. I’m seeing these amazing researchers in the lab. For them to present something to me and show me what they’re doing with their little pipettes and their organoids and their posters. And then when the PI and the other people will walk away and they’ll think “the reason I got involved in cancer is because my grandmother, and let me tell you this story.” And we’re actually getting that level of connection because my belief is that the folks that are doing the research in some ways have a lot more heart in it. Because you guys are out there solving the problems, trying to create the tools so the doctors and the oncologists can utilise them. And so you need to keep doing that and that’s really where that power is.
George Sflomos: Thank you Terri, so much, for your useful insights. Maybe we can continue the discussion with Ines, you have your hand raised, and then it’s Tanja.
Ines Vaz-Luiz: I think more and more our organisations are pushing researchers to do this in a systematic way. So when I look at my institution, we are starting to be organised into pushing this idea of the basic science project to the more clinical project, do it in a perspective of co-creation. And this means having teams that are able to do this connection.
We see this in the European grants, it’s mandatory to have this type of patient involvement. And we do have more and more institutions. We have a network of living labs. We are starting to build networks that have researchers that are able to, in a formal way, engage researchers and patients together to co-create projects, products, that are more, as I learned today, more patient inclusive and not only centric.
Martha to your point, I think if we look to our institutions, and I know my institution is special, but I do think we can push all the institutions to have structures within them to help researchers to do these connections.
And I do think we have more and more resources out there and more and more teams out there that are able to engage in a formal way in these co-creation activities and help us to really formalise this idea that we can do all types of research with patients, for patients, and the researcher will be able to be better.
As Robin said, we’ll be able to formally evaluate the impact that these type of actions have, formally evaluate our capacity to engage patients that come from different backgrounds.
So Marta, I do think more and more there are teams out there that are able to help researchers to do this in a formalised way, and there are networks out there.
George Sflomos: Exactly. I think this is what is happening currently in different institutes, hospitals and academic places. And Tanja, you have a comment on?
Tanja Spanic: Yes. I would just like to add that maybe really in the clinical trials and in this clinical research, stage three clinical trials and so on, we see a lot of improvement. Harder is to get engaged with basic science researchers, with translational science.
So I think that also platforms, like EACR or AACR, are good to share all of these resources, links, which organisations are the real organisations or trained patient advocates. And then through that network you can probably reach the patient that you need for your project.
And I would really point out how important, if you’re working on a national level, to have someone from your country, because it’s a really different perspective even within Europe. If you are working in France, you really need a French patient advocate and probably patient advocate from Austria would not be a good one for you.
It’s important to think what kind of involvement do you need. If you are doing global research, that really doesn’t matter. But if you’re really working on a national level, I think it’s better to have someone from your own country.
George Sflomos: Yeah, absolutely. Marianna, you want to add something?
Marianna Vitaloni: Just a comment, for example, we usually attend ESMO conference, the European Medical Society on Oncology, and there is a dedicated part of the conference to patient advocacy and unfortunately what we see is that usually the ones attending these sessions are patients or patient advocates.
So maybe also try to be open. I know that when you are a scientist or a physician and going to a conference, you really want to learn the science and the novelties, but maybe just leave a little window also to learn more on how to engage more with patients in research, which can be an opportunity.
George Sflomos: Absolutely, yes. Thanks for all your suggestions and ideas. That’s absolutely the way to go. Marta, if you have any other comment or we forgot something from the questions?
Marta Puyol: To be honest, I have a trillion questions because it has been amazing to have all those speakers. One thing that we discuss here a lot, one of the challenges is also the mental health of the patients because they are patients and caregivers and that they really have to be okay to be involved in this kind of project.
So, is this a challenge that you have also identified any of you, and how do you work with this?
Terri Conneran: Okay. Well we’re worried about our mental health too. And I don’t say that to be glib. I say that because we’re trying to get through our cancer treatment.
And so I loved the definition of what a patient is because it’s not necessarily a patient that’s in the throes of treatment right now today. And so you kind of have to widen your mindset. But as far as the mental health portion of it, it is real. And the other part is not every patient is really right to be a research partner.
And there’s different levels of advocacy and different levels of patient involvement. And so it depends on the type of the research. There is some research that it would be fantastic to do, and some people wanna see at a very molecular level. Other people really wanna get very involved in a policy level or something else.
It’s like dating, okay. And we don’t quite have a Tinder app for this, but you need to get out there because it’s not gonna happen if you don’t ask and have the conversation.
I’ve met patient advocates and been involved all over the world, and one of the best things that we do that we really enjoy doing, let me repeat that. Patient and patient advocates really enjoy connecting you to somebody who can help you, even if it’s not me. So ask.
Marta Puyol: Thank you very much Terri. Dave, I see your hand.
David Chuter: What I do see is often it takes two to three years for a patient to be in a mental state to be an advocate, and not think about their own treatment, their own problems, and recovering themselves. Other people it can take a year. It is looking at how that patient is feeling themselves, where they want to get involved. There are so many different levels of getting involved in research. Working on research papers, policy making, the scientific side, and again to understand that there’s so many different ways of getting there.
It comes back to the training again. There’s not one set training. We all sometimes need the basic of being able to get involved with PPI, as a patient advocate. Other times, the voice course I run is geared towards patient advocates who want to learn about the science of research. And they got you looking at the academic side.
So there’s so many different avenues there and it’s not really been mapped out. So I think something we can do is look out how we can map out that training for the future.
Researchers also need training. I do a lot of work with early career researchers. The voice course, we have the postdoc students teaching us in the labs, teaching the patient advocates. It’s often their first contact with patients within their role. And it’s on their patch, in their labs and they’re working with us and they are learning with us.
That’s the future I think for PPI in research. But then you’ve got the established researchers. They haven’t had that PPI training. They kind of need that as well. And we need to talk with them, try and help them understand where we are, why we’re doing this, and how we can help, because our lived experience and expertise cannot be taught anywhere, not in any classroom. It’s gotta come from the heart of each patient. There’s a lot to think about for the future, I think.
Marta Puyol: Sophie.
Sophie Postel-Vinay: Yeah, I just wanted to react on that very briefly just to say that the recent increasing involvement of patients in grant and grant preview panels and the importance of patients in this, has been also extremely impactful and helpful, I think, for all level researchers to really try to put proposals that really matter to patients. And I just think it’s an extremely positive initiative in which the Anglo-Saxon countries are very much more advanced than other countries. But I think it’s becoming more and more global and I really encourage this. I think it’s a very positive thing. It’s a nice way as well to exchange on priorities.
Tanja Spanic: If I may add here where Sophie opened this question. The other problem that we mentioned is the training of our community. We are not such a big community that we could bring many different people to different tables. So we have to train our community. That’s why we are trying on different levels and not all the patient advocates should be on the same high level as EUPATI trainees or weekend trainees or ERTC (EURORDIS – Rare Diseases Europe – Round Table of Companies) trainees. I know that in the US they have also fabulous programmes for patient advocates, but there’s no need for all to be on the scientific level.
But on the other hand, it’s also important that we get more people interested in science so we can get a bigger pool of people. And also, as David mentioned, to train healthcare professionals and researchers how to communicate and how to bring people around the table. And I think that we have already some nice examples also within the European projects that hopefully these resources will be shared for everybody where patient advocates are providing trainings for healthcare professionals and researchers on collaboration, co-creation.
Terri Conneran: Part of this is a result of what you’re learning in school about the biology and how to research and the formats and those things that you need to go through. This needs to be part of that criteria and that sort of lessons that are going on. I’m starting to see it happen just from my own personal networking. That’s happening whether it’s through me or other people are being invited to do presentations.
I can also tell you that what happens when we’re going in and we’re having a conversation and a researcher is studying something from cancer, say at a molecular level, and talking about targeted therapies.
They don’t even realise that that’s not the real world for a patient, that you’re getting a diagnosis and coming the other direction. You can’t imagine why we wouldn’t possibly want to go out and get a scan or get some sort of information when that’s a diagnosis. It’s starting to happen. It’s starting to be a groundswell, and I challenge the people on this call.
Y’all are professors, you’re teachers, you have networks. This is your opportunity to do something along those lines within your institutions and share the collaboration through it and use this excellent information to do something where you’re standing, because that’s the only way things really change, is to change what it is where you are right now.
Marta Puyol: Great. Well, thank you very much, it’s been clear that the active participation of patients is not only valuable, but essential for advancing meaningful and impactful cancer research.
Patients are not just participants. They are partners. They are co-creators. And they are the catalyst of changes. We have to continue integrating their voice, their experience, and their insight if we really want to move closer to research and not only to go deep into scientific questions, but really be much more impactful. Thank you very much to everyone.
George Sflomos: Thank you Martha, for these excellent discussions today. Also, I would like to thank all the speakers for their contributions and openness to talk to share. It’s really amazing. It’s really unique and I hope we see more in the future. Let’s continue to make this collaboration even more strong and to build more bridges in all Europe and international and Canada, US and yeah, thank you all.
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