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  • News | 22 Sep 2025

CancerWatch: transforming how cancer data is collected, harmonized and used

Coordinated by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and involving 92 partner organisations from 29 countries, CancerWatch will enhance the quality, comparability, and timeliness of data from population-based cancer registries across Europe.

Cancer
CancerWatch

With a kick-off in Oslo, today marks the start of CancerWatch, a new EU Joint Action that will transform how Europe collects, harmonizes, and uses cancer data. The Joint Action will deliver new tools, shared methodologies, and a roadmap for future cancer indicators, while also identifying opportunities to expand registry coverage into currently uncovered regions.

Accurate, complete, and up-to-date cancer data are essential for monitoring trends, identifying inequalities, and evaluating the impact of prevention, early detection, and treatment programmes, as well as Quality of Life and survival rates. CancerWatch will ensure that high-quality data are available to the European Cancer Information System (ECIS), which plays a central role in Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and the European Cancer Inequalities Registry (ECIR).

CancerWatch will:

  • Support cancer registries in capturing richer, more complete and timely data, using digital innovations;
  • Harmonize data quality standards across countries in line with European and international guidelines;
  • Develop technical solutions to address legal and GDPR-related barriers to sharing individual-level data, enabling secure use of aggregated statistics;
  • Improve survival, prevalence, and other key cancer indicators in ECIS, ensuring they are up-to-date and fit for policy-making;
  • Prepare cancer registries for integration into the European Health Data Space (EHDS).

CancerWatch builds on the work of the European Network of Cancer Registries (ENCR), the Joint Research Centre (JRC), and international partners such as the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), aligning efforts to deliver faster, more reliable insights.


For more information about the project, visit: www.encr.eu/CancerWatch