Building For The Future With Andrea Seale, CEO Of The Canadian Cancer Society

Your organization, you do such a great job of being evidence-based in a lot of the claims and a lot of the work, and you're contributing a lot of evidence to the cancer journey, the importance of cancer research, the importance of

cancer

prevention.

As CEO, you're in it day-to-day, you're talking to people, all of your essential partners on a regular basis.

How do you measure that progress to scale on a day-to-day basis as CEO?

That's definitely challenging.

A lot of What we want to see happen, it does take decades.

So the area of cancer research is a really good example.

The things that we, Canadian Cancer Society, has invested more than $2 billion into cancer research in the last five decades.

The big innovations that have happened decade by decade going from 1940s where it was maybe surgery to the 50s where there was radiation and chemotherapy to now the newer frontiers being immunotherapy and precision medicine, the timescale foreseeing that progress is decades.

But I think when we look back, we can see that the investment, the choices that were made to invest in research, the way that our peer review process has helped us identify what are the promising areas to support clinical trials that have helped to bring things into clinical practice.

We can see the progress that has happened.

And I guess our goal is to make sure that today we're investing in what is the cutting edge of tomorrow and using the experts from within the scientific community around the world to help us set those targets and make those right investments.

So research is one that takes a longer time horizon.

Some of our advocacy work though, it's a much shorter horizon and we can see that impact on people immediately.

So things like right now, actually, this spring, we've been talking a lot about colorectal cancer screening, for example.

And we can see that younger people are being diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

People born after 1980 are two and a half times more likely to be diagnosed than older people.

So there's something happening there that's really important.

But our cancer screening programs across the country, they're only screening people at age 50.

So we've been working with with others in the colorectal cancer community to try to talk about lowering screening ages.

And some provinces are starting to do that.

So advocacy issues, we can really see the immediate impact on people's lives and on the cancer experience.

And That's a big part of our strategy going forward, too.

We want to work at that kind of systemic change level to be able to impact the whole population.