The Centre for Innovation in Medicine (Coordinator), together with 16 European Partners launched, on May 16-17, the European-funded Horizon Cancer Mission project “Personalized CANcer Primary Prevention Research through Citizen Participation and digitally-enabled social innovation” (4P-CAN) in Bucharest, Romania.
Over four years, 4P-CAN (www.4p-can.eu) will identify barriers to cancer primary prevention measures adoption by studying risk factors for cancer such as smoking, alcohol consumption, physical inactivity, excess body weight, HPV and HBV infections (preventable through vaccination) and environmental pollution. The project will gather evidence around individual adherence to healthy behaviours in countries from Eastern Europe such as Romania, Bulgaria, the Republic of Moldova, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Ukraine.
“4P-CAN is a very timely project because it’s addressing the primary prevention of cancer in the context of the Cancer Mission recommendations, with the primary aim to develop a new model of personalised primary prevention, based on innovative approaches from the social sciences and humanities. It benefits from the expertise of 17 beneficiaries, from 11 countries. We know that cancer primary prevention is neglected and underfunded – only 5% of the research funds were spent on it in the last decade. On the other side, we have high expectations of the citizens to invest and to come up with more efficient solutions for cancer prevention. 4P-CAN answers to this need and aims to find new effective strategies to approach cancer primary prevention. Moreover, our consortium is highly representative at the European level, mixing Eastern and Western partners, and so being able to understand and address the East-West inequalities in cancer.”
Dr Marius Geanta, 4P-CAN Coordinator, President of the Centre for Innovation in Medicine
The 4P-CAN project is built on an innovative vision that seeks to understand the complex system surrounding the citizen and how it increases the risk of cancer on three levels – macro (at the national level), meso (at the community level), and micro (at the individual level). The project will follow the narrative of the European Code Against Cancer, implementing research, social sciences, and humanities with behavioural sciences to create personalized tools for the primary prevention of cancer. Based on project knowledge and implementation methods, 4P-CAN will establish two living labs, one in Romania and one in Bulgaria, targeting the adoption of preventive behaviours based on the 12 recommendations of the Code.
The 4P-CAN project is a collaboration among 17 organizations from 11 different countries, including the Balkan countries, which are European Union (EU) Member States and non-EU Member States, and Western EU Member States such as Portugal, Italy, France, Ireland, and Belgium.
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