Plenary lecture

Cancer Survival in five continents (CONCORD study)

Michel Coleman, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

Michel Coleman has been Professor of Epidemiology and Vital Statistics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine since 1995. He was Deputy Chief Medical Statistician at the Office for National Statistics from 1995 to 2004 and Head of the Cancer and Public Health Unit at the School from 1998 to 2003. He has previously worked for the World Health Organisation at the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon (1987–1991), and was Medical Director of the Thames Cancer Registry in London (1991–1995). The interests of Dr. Coleman are trends in cancer incidence, mortality and survival, and the application of these tools to the public health control of cancer. He has published over 200 articles on these topics, including ‘‘Cancer survival in five continents: a worldwide population-based study (CONCORD)’’, the first worldwide analysis of cancer survival, with standard quality-control procedures and identical analytic methods for all datasets. CONCORD provides survival estimates for 1.9 million adults (aged 15– 99 years) diagnosed with a first, primary, invasive cancer of the breast (women), colon, rectum, or prostate during 1990–1994 and followed up to 1999, using individual tumour records from 101 population-based cancer registries in 31 countries on five continents.