Project: ‘Essential medicine for children with cancer’

Eva Brack and Maria Otth

The 7th WHO Model List of Essential Medicines for Children was just published in July 2019. This document also incorporates a section on antineoplastic drugs. The medicines listed in this section are either minimum medicines needs for a basic health-care system or essential medicines for specific diseases, for which specialized diagnostic or monitoring facilities, and/or specialist medical care, and/or specialist training are needed.
A SIOPE initiative, led by Professor G. Vassal, director of Clinical Research from Gustave Roussy Paris, aims to renew this list of essential medicine for Europe together with members of Young SIOPE. This list will afterwards serve as a guidance for the local governments. Renewing this list will include thorough literature search on drugs for each tumour entity and close collaboration with the tumour groups.

Project: ‘Mentorship and clinical trial group involvement’

Erika Pace and Nicolas Herold

One of the aims of Young SIOPE is to involve young professionals in the clinical trial groups. Early involvement of young enthusiastic, out-of-the-box thinking, eager to learn professionals is of shared interest. For young professionals these will help to grow their network, learn how to work and collaborate within a clinical trial group and become involved in a working project.

Work needs to be done to outline the organisation of the involvement of young professionals. One of the aims is to connect involved Young SIOPE members with an experienced member of the clinical trial group, ‘the mentorship project’. Mentorship will be organized and evaluated according to a specific programme adapted from the COG mentorship programme. This initiative will be supported by the COG Young Oncologists in terms of experience and advice.

Project: ‘Education: the art of sharing knowledge’

Teresa de Rojas and Roelof van Ewijk

We believe education is a key aspect for early-career professionals in oncology. During our first SIOPE meeting in Prague, we organised collaborative educational meetings with the ECHO group and Pancare. Developing a high-quality interactive educational programme for the SIOP Europe 2020 Annual Meeting, in collaboration with the clinical trial groups, is one of our challenges.

Next to that, we are involved in the development of the SIOPE Course in Paediatric Haemato-Oncology.
We believe that we not only need experts to learn but that we can learn a lot from other Young SIOPE members. Therefore, we are looking into creating structures for networking and possibilities to exchange our ideas and knowledge.

If you wish to join a Young SIOPE project, please send an email to: anne.blondeel@siope.eu