Joint ENCR–IACR Scientific Conference 2023, 13–16 November 2023, Granada, Spain

The International Association of Cancer Registries (IACR) resumed in-person participation at its annual scientific conference last week in Granada, Spain. The 2023 conference was organized jointly with the European Network of Cancer Registries (ENCR) and hosted by the Andalusian School of Public Health and the Cancer Registry of Granada led by Professor María José Sánchez Pérez. The meeting was attended by more than 350 participants and included themes covering special populations research, registry innovation, COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) impact, staging and comorbidity, and clinical applications. There were four keynote lectures, including the 2023 Johannes Clemmesen Lecture, presented by Dr Prashant Mathur of the Indian Council of Medical Research. In addition to several consortium and working-group coordination meetings, there were four pre-conference registration workshops on collecting treatment data, survival metrics, cancer recurrences, and artificial intelligence. Jacques Ferlay, who retired from IARC in 2022 after 33 years of service, was among the awardees of the IACR Honorary Fellowship this year.

The IARC Cancer Surveillance Branch provides the Secretariat to the IACR, which is the professional society of population-based cancer registries worldwide. As well as facilitating the uniformity of registry operations via international standards and recommendations, the Secretariat promotes information exchange, including via the annual IACR scientific conferences, which have been held in different world regions on an annual basis since 1988. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the IACR hosted virtual conferences in 2022 and 2021, and last week’s meeting in Spain was the first in-person meeting since 2019 in Vancouver, Canada.

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