LIH expertise contributes to strengthening Europe’s cancer intelligence

Two new publications highlight the importance of high-quality population-based cancer data in guiding cancer prevention, early detection, and care across Europe.

• Department of Precision Health
• Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention (EPICAN)
• Cancer
• Public Health Expertise

Two new publications involving Dr Claudine Backes, Scientific Director of Luxembourg’s National Cancer Registry (RNC) and Team Leader of the Cancer Epidemiology & Prevention Group (EPICAN) at the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), and Max Xhauflair, European Projects and Public Affairs Officer within EPICAN, highlight the need for stronger and more sustainable cancer data infrastructures across Europe. Published in Acta Oncologica and The Lancet Regional Health Europe, the two publications address complementary aspects of the same challenge: how to ensure that high-quality population-based cancer data can be transformed into timely, comparable and actionable cancer intelligence for research, surveillance and policy.

Reliable population-level data are essential to understanding the burden of cancer, identifying inequalities and assessing whether prevention, screening and care strategies are delivering the expected results. Population-based cancer registries (PBCRs) provide this evidence by systematically collecting information on cancer cases and producing indicators such as incidence, prevalence and survival. Yet registries across Europe continue to face challenges ranging from incomplete geographic coverage and delays in data availability to limited resources, differing levels of digitalisation and long-term sustainability.

Strengthening Europe’s cancer registry infrastructure

Published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe, the Comment “Every cancer patient counts: strengthening European population-based cancer registries to improve cancer control” – The Lancet Regional Health – Europe” highlights the central role of PBCRs as part of Europe’s public-health infrastructure. Their data feed into the European Cancer Information System (ECIS), helping to reveal differences in cancer burden and outcomes across and within countries and providing evidence to guide prevention, early detection, cancer care and resource allocation. The authors call for stronger recognition of PBCRs, sustainable funding and resources, clearer expectations for data quality and timeliness, and closer integration of registries into cancer-control programmes.

The Comment provides the policy case for strengthening this infrastructure: timely, high-quality population-based cancer data are essential for monitoring cancer burden and evaluating cancer control across Europe.

CancerWatch: strengthening Europe’s cancer intelligence

A complementary editorial in Acta Oncologica, “CancerWatch: accelerating Europe’s cancer intelligence”, focuses on how these challenges are being addressed through the CancerWatch Joint Action. Running from September 2025 to August 2028 and bringing together 92 organisations from 29 countries, the European Joint Action aims to improve the quality, timeliness and usability of cancer data for surveillance, research and policy. Its work ranges from strengthening national registries and harmonising methods and quality standards to supporting digital innovation, including AI-assisted tools, and preparing cancer registries for closer integration with ECIS and the emerging European Health Data Space (EHDS).

CancerWatch is also developing and testing digital solutions, including automated extraction from health information systems, AI-assisted processing of pathology reports and automated support for case identification and coding. These approaches aim to reduce workload and improve the completeness and timeliness of cancer registration while maintaining data validity through appropriate quality assurance and expert oversight. An important element of this work is preparing cancer registry data for the evolving European health-data ecosystem. CancerWatch supports the use of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data principles, strengthened documentation and metadata, and robust quality-assurance approaches. The CancerWatch quality framework also builds on approaches developed through the EU-funded QUANTUM project, including quality labelling, automated plausibility checks, incidence–mortality comparisons and improved documentation of registry datasets. These approaches aim to make cancer data more transparent, assessable and reusable for research, surveillance and policy.

LIH plays a key role in ensuring that these advances have a lasting impact, contributing to CancerWatch through expertise spanning cancer epidemiology, data quality, digitalisation, interoperability and sustainability. Indeed, CancerWatch’s sustainability work package is co-led by the LIH Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention group (EPICAN) and the Andalusian School of Public Health, Spain. At LIH, the work package is led by Dr Backes, who coordinates the development and implementation of the project’s sustainability strategy, with the aim of embedding its outputs in lasting national and European structures beyond 2028. EPICAN also contributes to methodological and cross-cutting CancerWatch activities and, through the RNC, connects these European developments with Luxembourg’s national cancer-surveillance landscape.

From data to cancer intelligence

Together, the two publications underline a common message: strengthening cancer registries is about much more than data collection.

Ensuring that every cancer patient is represented in reliable population-level data, and that these data can be transformed into timely and actionable intelligence, is essential to better understand cancer burden and inequalities, evaluate cancer-control measures and ultimately support better prevention and care across Luxembourg and Europe.