Good cancer care everywhere – Where you live should not determine how long you live, or how healthy you are

April 15, 2021, will stand as a beacon moment in our history, one that more than clearly highlights our company’s purpose – applying innovation to help people live longer, healthier lives. As of today, Siemens Healthineers and Varian Medical Systems have become one team. We are now on the way, together, to eliminating the fear of cancer by making it a manageable, chronic illness, for the long-term control of which we can now provide even better support to our customers and their patients. With 65,000 employees, our setup is more global than ever, and we’re now even closer to our customers than we ever could have been individually.

We’re taking this step at a moment when healthcare systems everywhere are facing a massive challenge that has occupied them for more than a year. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic will still concern everyone for a long time to come. We are helping wherever we can. At the same time, the world must not lose sight of the other serious illnesses that also impair people’s health, quality of life, and welfare. Once again, privileged countries and organizations face the responsibility of assisting the less privileged to combat these illnesses.

One of these illnesses is cancer – the world’s second most common cause of death, responsible for ten million fatalities a year. And two-thirds of these are from low- and medium-income countries. There most of all, cancer patients have only very limited access to diagnostics and therapy; when they show up at a doctor’s office, if at all, it happens only late in the process. And for that reason, the data on the actual incidence of cancer in these countries is equally poor. Moreover, no matter what the country, no one can put a figure on the personal suffering of the patients and their families. But something that can be expressed in numbers is the economic consequences. The World Health Organization puts the economic cost of cancer at US$ 1.16 trillion a year, based on 2010 figures – and the trend is rising.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity, together with my colleagues Deepak Khuntia and Elena Nioutsikou, to work on a published comment for The Lancet Oncology Commission. We pointed out how innovative medical technology can significantly improve cancer care in low- to medium-income countries. Every dollar or euro that is wisely invested in improving cancer care in these countries pays off many times over in terms of benefits of scale – and saves years of lives. One of our aspirations is to ensure that our ideas on this point reach the broadest possible audience. And for that reason, below you’ll find a summary of our comments. You can read the full-length original in The Lancet Oncology, at no charge after registration.

One of the strongest sources of motivation for my colleagues in the health industry, and for me personally, is the fight against inequity in medical care. Many people on our team, and throughout the industry, share this personal commitment, together with a great fascination with technologies that are making medicine more precise, more humane, and more accessible. Wherever human beings run up against limits, those limits can be broadened with technological tools. In regions where medical experts are in short supply, technology can furnish a bridge to patients. We have had good experiences with telemedical care for Covid-19 patients, with computer tomography scanners that are operated from far away rather than from the next room, and with digital, AI-based assistants that support doctors in making decisions. These experiences are transferable to the remote care of cancer patients where there are not enough expert resources locally. Easier operation and simplified commissioning of some medical devices means that treatments can also be performed by less experienced personnel if there are no highly qualified experts on site.

As Siemens Healthineers and Varian Medical Systems pool their resources as of today, together we will come to understand the biology of cancer better and better. That will enable us to optimize treatments further by more precisely tracking their effects over time and adjusting therapy as needed, in a form that is personalized for each patient. No one in treatment should have to content themselves with mere half measures. But unfortunately, that’s not realistic yet for most people in the world. The care delivery shortfalls still gape too wide. We want to help improve access to medical care everywhere.

Because addressing the uniqueness of our gene codes should not be influenced by our ZIP codes.

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Acknowledgment: I would like to thank my co-author of our commentary published on The Lancet Oncology, Deepak Khuntia MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Varian Medical Systems, and Elena Nioutsikou, Principal Key Expert, Medical Affairs Cancer Therapy at Siemens Healthineers, for their contributions.