Lyon, 17–18 May 2012 Auditorium

Governing Council GC/54/3
Fifty-fourth Session 03/04/2012
Lyon, 17–18 May 2012
Auditorium
DIRECTOR’S REPORT
1. This Director’s Report covers the period since the 53rd Session of the Governing Council.
2. The IARC Biennial Report 2010–2011 contains an extensive review of the scientific
achievements of the Agency over the last two years. The current Report provides, therefore,
complementary information on other aspects of the Agency’s overall portfolio of activities.
Introduction
3. Over the last year the Agency has continued involvement in the international effort on
noncommunicable diseases (NCD). Following the “First Global Ministerial Conference on Healthy
Lifestyles and Noncommunicable Diseases” organized by the Russian Federation in collaboration
with the World Health Organization (WHO) in April 2011 the Agency worked closely with WHO in
preparation for the high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly held in New York
on the 18–19 September 2011. The Director participated in both meetings and the Agency had
earlier contributed to the preparation of the first WHO Global Status Report on Noncommunicable
Diseases, setting out the challenge of the worldwide burden, associated risk factors and prevention
strategies for NCD.
4. These meetings highlighted the direct relevance and value of the activities of the Agency in
the context of the global NCD agenda. Based on its expertise, international status and reputation,
IARC is ideally placed for a significant future role, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
In particular the distinction of IARC as a research agency is important. The Agency can contribute
to the necessary evidence-base on global cancer burden, the causation and prevention of cancer,
and help with capacity building through its education and training activities. IARC has a unique
collaborative network in low- and middle-income countries which provides an excellent platform for
these various components. Positioning the Agency to participate in global and regional
collaborative efforts is an important part of our future plans.
5. If the Agency is to realize its full potential to contribute to cancer control it needs to establish
new partnerships and identify new resources. One strategy is to welcome new Participating States,
a goal supported by the Governing Council Subcommittee on the Admission of New Participating
States which met in October 2011. In this regard, the Director visited Brazil in December 2011 and
met with the Minister of Health, Dr Alexander Padilha, as well as the Director of the National
Cancer Institute, Dr Luiz Santini. The Minister expressed the desire of Brazil to rejoin IARC as a
Participating State as soon as possible. A Memorandum of Understanding was also signed with the

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National Cancer Institute of Argentina, with one of the areas of agreement being to explore
Argentina rejoining IARC. Contacts with other potential Participating States continue to be
explored.
6. In relation to new partnerships, the Agency organized the IARC-Latin America Collaboration
(I-LAC) Meeting which was attended by Directors from fifteen different National Cancer Centres
from the region together with representatives from WHO, the Union for International Cancer
Control (UICC), the National Cancer Institute, USA (NCI USA) Centre for Global Health and the Pan
American Health Organization. The meeting took place on the 26–27 March 2012 in Lyon and
resulted in a series of high priority areas being identified including: cancer registration; cancer
screening; cancer etiology and prevention (particularly breast and head and neck cancer) as well
as training in cancer research. It was also agreed that IARC would work closely with the Network
of National Cancer Institutes (RINC) in the region.
7. The above approach to developing key partnerships is one way to ensure that the Agency is
able to play a critical role in promoting international collaboration in a changing environment.
The I-LAC proved a great success in identifying areas of common priority in a defined geographic
region and in placing the Agency at the heart of regional networks. The plan is to extend this
process to other areas over time, notably to the Middle-East, south-east Asia and Africa.
8. Such partnerships reflect the evolving global cancer research community. The Agency has
established an enormous reservoir of collaborators over its 45 year history. The IARC Alumni is
one approach taken to cultivate contacts with ex-staff, fellows and visiting scientists. Many of
those past colleagues now work in parts of the world where cancer research is increasingly
counted as a priority. Therefore whilst creating the high-level partnerships which enable the
Agency to play a leading role in the international effort against cancer, we are also drawing on our
own heritage of goodwill from individual researchers around the world to maximize the
collaborative opportunities for IARC.
International ranking
9. The Director’s Report contains a number of key performance indicators (KPI) for the
calendar year 2011 which permit trends over a four year period to be considered.
10. A complementary approach is to refer to exercises that produce global rankings of research
organizations. For the moment the majority of these focus on universities or higher education
institutions (HEIs). However over the last three years there is an analysis covering not only HEIs
but also other research organizations (health system, government agencies, private corporations
and others) of different sizes and working across all subject areas, i.e. not restricted to health.
11. The SCImago Institutions Report (SIR) is produced by the SCImago research group in Spain.
The report (http://www.scimagoir.com/pdf/sir_2011_world_report_ni.pdf) encompasses
3042 institutions responsible for more than 80% of worldwide scientific output during the period
2005–09 as indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database.

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12. The SIR “Normalized Impact Report” ranks organizations according to impact, based on
citation of published work. The calculated value is expressed in percentages and shows the
relationship of an institution's average scientific impact compared to the world average, which is 1:
i.e. a score of 0.8 means the institution is cited 20% below average and 1.3 means the institution
is cited 30% above average.
13. Of the 3042 institutions worldwide, the Agency ranks 32nd, being 8th in Europe and 1st in
France. The normalized impact of the Agency’s publications is 2.74, revealing a remarkably high
citation rate. For the Agency to be in the top 1% of all organizations included worldwide is an
outstanding achievement. The Report also measures the ratio of publications that an institution
publishes in the journals ranked in the first quartile (Q1, 25%) in their categories. The Agency has
a Q1 of 86.6% (i.e. in 31st place overall).
14. It is informative to compare the Agency specifically to other dedicated cancer research
centres. For information, Annex 1 of this Report contains comparative data extracted from the SIR
World Report 2011. The highest ranked cancer research institute is the Dana Farber Cancer
Institute, ranked 9th, followed by the Agency at 32nd, the Catalan Institute of Oncology at 33rd, the
“Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale Tumori di Milano” at 43rd, the Institute for Cancer Research
UK at 44th and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre at 52nd.
15. The Governing Council requested some measure of the collaborative nature of the research
at the Agency. The SIR World Report 2011 includes a measure of international collaboration which
examines the institution's publications that include co-authors from research organizations in
countries other than the one in which the institution itself is based. The figure for the Agency is
87%; ranking 9th overall (i.e. almost 90% of papers have authors outside of France); there are
only five institutions with a higher collaboration index among the organizations in the SIR.
16. The Agency is continuing to explore other in-house measures to provide KPIs that represent
the wide-ranging collaborations of scientific staff with partners in different countries.
Highlight events
17. The Agency held a meeting of stakeholders in July 2011 to discuss how to increase the
coverage and quality of cancer registration in low- and middle-income countries. This led to the
Global Initiative for Cancer Registry Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (GICR).
GICR was launched on 18 November 2011 during the UICC World Cancer Leaders’ Summit in
Dublin, Ireland. Currently the Agency is working with UICC, NCI USA and other partners to seek
resources for the funding of this initiative. The strategy is to establish a number of regional “hubs”
of expertise in cancer registration which would serve as a resource to other cancer registries in a
region.

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18. The inaugural hub was established in Mumbai, India at the Tata Memorial Centre in 2011.
It is planned to establish a second hub in Izmir, Turkey in 2012 with valuable support having been
committed by the new NCI Centre for Global Health in collaboration with the Agency. During 2011
it was of interest that new legislation in South Africa required that the new national cancer registry
“conforms to the norms and standards as determined by IARC”.
19. The Agency has hosted a number of important events over the past year. Notable among
these was the visit of the Director of the newly established National Cancer Centre of the People’s
Republic of China, Professor Jie He on 5 October 2011. He was accompanied by Dr Min Dai, an ex-
staff member at IARC. The Director of the Agency has a reciprocal visit to Beijing planned for later
in 2012.
20. A Spanish delegation, led by Dr Navas, the Director of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III,
Madrid, Spain and accompanied by Dr Marina Pollán and Dr Carlos Segovia from the Scientific and
Governing Councils respectively, visited the Agency on 4 November 2011 in order to identify
potential for cooperation between the organizations, including in the area of training fellowships.
21. A two-day research meeting was also held between scientists from the German Cancer
Centre (DKFZ) and IARC on 17–18 October 2011, which led to a number of ideas and new
collaborative projects across the two organizations. A scientific meeting on “Emerging Oncogenic
Viruses” has been jointly organized with the DKFZ and will be held in Italy in the early
summer 2012.
22. The World Cancer Day in 2012 (4 February) took as its theme: “Together it is possible”. The
Agency highlighted this initiative with a web-based feature including podcasts by the Director and
by Dr Rolando Herrero (Head, Prevention and Implementation Group), focusing on cervical cancer.
23. For logistic reasons the IARC Day 2012 will be held on 23 October this year. The theme will
be Nutrition and Cancer and the two recipients of the IARC Medal of Honour will be
Drs John Potter (20th Roger Sohier Lecture) and Walter Willet (9th Sir Richard Doll Lecture).
24. A new event has also been planned, the IARC Cancer and Society Lecture, to be held on
28 June 2012. The inaugural speaker will be Dr David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for
Occupational Safety and Health, Washington, USA. It is planned that this event, open to all Agency
staff, will take place as a New Year lecture in 2013.
Scientific organization and highlights
Scientific organization
25. Dr Rolando Herrero arrived in June 2012, representing an exciting new appointment for the
Agency. Given the strategic emphasis being placed on prevention and Dr Herrero’s experience, a
new Group was created in September 2012 entitled the Prevention and Implementation Group
(PRI) with Dr Herrero as Head. The Group is part of the Section of Early Detection and Prevention
led by Dr Sankaranarayanan.
26. Dr Ramatoulie Njie was recruited to Head the Gambia Hepatitis Intervention Study (GHIS) as
from 31 May 2011. Dr Njie is based in The Gambia and her appointment was enabled by support
from the Voluntary Undesignated Contributions (Resolution GC/51/R9). This is the first time for

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many years that the Agency has had a scientist based in The Gambia and dedicated to GHIS. The
appointment also opens the possibility to develop other research projects in West Africa on the
foundation provided by this long-term project.
27. In the area of Mechanisms of Carcinogenesis, the Molecular Carcinogenesis Group has been
renamed the Molecular Mechanisms and Biomarkers Group, to reflect a greater emphasis on the
application of the laboratory science to epidemiological studies. A new Group Head is being
recruited following the departure of Dr Hainaut in December 2011.
28. A new Head of Education and Training (ETR), Anouk Berger, was recruited with an
appointment made in March 2012. The Agency specifically sought someone with skills in distance
learning, consistent with our strategy in this area. One consequence of the delay in recruitment
was that the review of ETR (Resolution GC/52/R5) did not take place at the 48th session of the
Scientific Council. This has been discussed with the Chairs and Vice-Chairs of the Governing and
Scientific Councils and the Governing Council is requested to approve the scheduled discussion for
the 49th session of the Scientific Council in February 2013, with a report to the Governing Council
at its 55th session in May 2013.
29. In order to promote research themes across the Agency, the first Research Leadership
Forum meeting for IARC Group Heads and senior scientists took place on 5 December 2011 on the
subject of breast cancer. All Agency scientists working on this topic came together for the day to
identify future opportunities for collaborative research. The format was much appreciated and will
be followed for other subjects in the future.
30. Following internal discussion among the staff, the Division of Administration and Finance has
been renamed the Section of Support to Research (SSR). This reflects the motivation of the
support staff to focus on service provision to the scientific Sections in their research.
Scientific highlights
31. The Biennial Report details the remarkable body of research and related achievements over
the last two years; it represents work of the highest scientific quality with a direct relevance to
cancer prevention. The Biennial Report is also characterized by certain features inherent to the
strategy of the Agency. These include international collaboration, interdisciplinary research, and
research training and capacity building, both through the research projects themselves as well as
more formal delivery of courses and award of fellowships.
32. Following the successful completion of the IARC Monograph Volume 100 (in six parts) the
Agency has recommenced its programme of three Monograph meetings per year. After the last
Governing Council the first meeting was volume 102 on Non-Ionizing Radiation, Part II,
Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields [including mobile phones] in May 2011. The Working Group
classified Radiofrequency Electromagnetic fields as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2B).
This meeting generated an unprecedented level of interest. Over 100 journalists joined a
telephone press conference immediately after the meeting ended and the Agency news release
had over 200 000 downloads.