The research was conducted by a team affiliated with the Lancet Oncology Commission on the Human Crisis in Cancer, an initiative launched to quantify and correct the growing imbalance between biomedical investment and the human dimensions of oncology. Using data from the 2023 global review by the International Cancer Control Partnership, the researchers screened a standardized questionnaire of 95 items and identified 20 questions relevant to five Commission domains: compassionate care models, human-centred metrics, equitable access to psychosocial and palliative services, workforce and education reform, and value-aligned governance. Those items were then mapped into six analytical themes spanning sociocultural factors, systems of care, medical education, economic protection, mental health and palliative care.

The single most striking finding concerns who gets a seat at the table. Although 93 percent of the plans reported that stakeholders were involved in their development, only 12 percent identified people living with cancer as stakeholders. Governmental, professional and institutional actors dominate cancer planning almost everywhere, meaning the very documents that set national priorities rarely reflect the priorities of the people they are meant to serve. The authors point to power imbalances, funding and time constraints, and simple lack of awareness as likely barriers, and note that World Health Organization guidance explicitly calls for engaging patient groups in national cancer control planning.

The income gradient in the data is stark. On average, human-centred themes appeared in 44 percent of plans from upper-middle and high-income countries but only 32 percent of plans from lower-middle and low-income countries. Medical education was the exception that proved the rule: 96 percent of countries with dedicated cancer plans included workforce development or provider training, with no significant difference between income groups. But the content of that training was overwhelmingly biomedical. Oncologists, pathologists and surgical specialists featured prominently, while psychosocial support training appeared in just 16 percent of plans, community health worker training in 12 percent, and patient navigator training in a mere 4 percent.

Economic protection emerged as perhaps the most neglected theme of all. Only 13 percent of plans included strategies to shield patients from catastrophic health expenditure — typically defined as spending more than 30 percent of household income on cancer-related costs — and the figure was essentially flat across income levels, with high-income countries actually among the least likely to include such provisions. Universal health coverage strategies appeared in just 26 percent of plans overall. Given that financial toxicity is a well-established driver of cancer inequity, treatment abandonment and poorer outcomes, the authors argue that this neglect represents a fundamental misalignment between policy and patient need.

Mental health provisions fared little better. While 72 percent of countries with cancer plans included strategies to support families or caregivers of patients in active treatment, only 3 percent of all plans referenced essential medicines for treating psychological distress such as anxiety, depression and delirium — the least frequently included item in the entire analysis. Post-treatment survivorship care appeared in 80 percent of high-income country plans but only 25 percent of low-income country plans, a difference that was highly statistically significant. This gap is particularly concerning given the documented burden of depression among cancer patients, which is highest on the African continent at a pooled prevalence of 35 percent, compared with 25 percent in North America, and given established links between psychological distress, quality of life, treatment adherence and survival.

Palliative care was the strongest-performing human-centred theme, appearing in an average of 65 percent of plans, with pain management strategies present in 62 percent and no significant income-based differences. Yet even here the picture is incomplete: patient navigation — the practice of guiding patients through screening, treatment, financial assistance and supportive services — was included in 42 percent of plans overall but dropped to around 11 percent in lower-income settings, precisely where late-stage presentation is most common and navigation may deliver the greatest benefit. In many African countries, up to 80 percent of patients present with locally advanced or metastatic disease at diagnosis, making supportive and navigational infrastructure not a luxury but a necessity.

The authors are careful to spell out what their analysis can and cannot show. Roughly 18 percent of WHO Member States lacked publicly available plans, and the study measured policy intent rather than implementation, funding or patient outcomes. A plan’s silence on psychosocial care does not prove the absence of services, since mental health or financial protection may be addressed through separate national health or universal coverage policies. Countries were weighted equally regardless of population, so the figures describe the proportion of countries rather than the proportion of people covered. In conflict-affected states, a plan can look comprehensive on paper while the health system it describes barely functions. Still, the consistency of the gaps across regions and income levels suggests a genuine structural blind spot rather than a documentation artifact.

The study’s conclusions align with the Commission’s broader call to rehumanize cancer care. Its recommendations include embedding scalable patient navigation — particularly financial navigation — into national plans, strengthening structural supports for caregivers, guaranteeing access to essential psychotropic medicines, reforming workforce training to include psychosocial competencies, and shifting governance toward value-aligned, equity-oriented models. The authors also propose that future iterations of the assessment instrument move beyond binary yes-or-no questions to capture whether commitments are actually costed, assigned to an agency, implemented and monitored, with equity-stratified indicators and patient-reported experience measures built in.

What makes the findings resonate beyond oncology is what they reveal about how health systems value intangible goods. Machines, drugs and screening programs are easy to cost, procure and count; compassion, dignity and psychological safety are not. The analysis suggests that unless national strategies explicitly name and resource the human dimensions of cancer care, those dimensions will continue to lose out in budget negotiations and implementation plans — and the patients who bear the heaviest burden of advanced disease, poverty and psychological distress will continue to be the least likely to receive them. The authors’ message to policymakers is blunt: a cancer strategy that plans only for the tumor, and not for the person, is an incomplete strategy.

Subject of Research: Global policy analysis of human-centred cancer care in national cancer strategy plans

Article Title: A cross-sectional global policy analysis of the human gap in 156 national cancer strategy plans

Article References: Lau, E., Shapiro, G. K., Rodin, G., Sullivan, R., Bhoo-Pathy, N., Unger-Saldaña, K., Trapani, D., Salins, N., Skelton, M., & Li, M. (2026). A cross-sectional global policy analysis of the human gap in 156 national cancer strategy plans. eClinicalMedicine, 100, Article 104244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2026.104244

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2026.104244

Keywords: national cancer control plans, human-centred care, psychosocial support, palliative care, patient navigation, health equity, financial protection, mental health, cancer policy, low-income countries, Lancet Oncology Commission, eClinicalMedicine

The study, conducted by Antonio Puertas Gallardo and Magdalena Stepien of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, together with Antonino Brunetto of ARHS Developments Italia in Milan, examined 102 projects funded under Horizon Europe, the EU4Health programme, and the Digital Europe Programme. Together, these initiatives represent a combined investment of more than 840 million euros dedicated to understanding, detecting, treating and preventing cancer. The work is significant not merely for its headline figures but for its methodology, which demonstrates how modern artificial intelligence tools can bring order to the sprawling, fragmented record of publicly funded research.

The researchers employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to characterise the funding landscape and identify patterns within it. The centrepiece of their approach was the application of large language model methodology to assign standardised keywords to each project in the portfolio. This was no trivial task. EU-funded cancer projects span an enormous range of activities, from laboratory-based investigations of tumour biology to public health campaigns and the construction of digital infrastructure for sharing clinical data. Without a common vocabulary, comparing projects across different programmes and directorates-general becomes nearly impossible, and opportunities for synergy go unnoticed.

By using large language models to read and classify project descriptions, the team developed a set of 56 standardised keywords capable of clustering the 102 projects into coherent thematic groups. This keyword framework allowed the researchers to identify synergies and thematic interconnections among cancer-related initiatives that would otherwise remain buried in separate databases and reporting formats. The most frequent terms to emerge from this analysis related to healthcare, policy and guidance, and digital aspects, reflecting the fact that EU cancer funding is not confined to the bench but extends deep into health systems, regulation and technology.

The thematic findings offer a revealing snapshot of European priorities. Most of the funded projects concentrated on diagnosis, treatment and prevention, the three pillars of clinical oncology. When the analysis turned to specific cancer types, colorectal and breast cancers emerged as the most common areas of focus, a pattern consistent with their status as two of the most frequently diagnosed malignancies in Europe and with the existence of dedicated screening programmes across many member states. The prominence of digital keywords underscores how thoroughly data science, artificial intelligence and e-health technologies have penetrated the cancer research agenda, from computational pathology platforms to federated networks for sharing sensitive patient information.

Equally striking were the geographic patterns the analysis uncovered. Institutions from larger western and southern European countries proved to be the most active participants in EU cancer funding, dominating both the coordination of projects and participation more broadly. Distinct collaboration networks between specific institutions were identified, revealing clusters of organisations that repeatedly join forces across successive funding calls. These networks represent a form of institutional capital that is invisible in simple funding statistics but crucial to understanding how European research capacity is actually organised and reproduced over time.

Perhaps the most politically consequential finding concerns the relationship between national characteristics and funding success. The study found that countries with larger populations were involved in a greater number of projects, but that countries with a higher gross domestic product per capita were not. In other words, wealth per citizen does not predict engagement with EU cancer funding, but sheer demographic weight does. This distinction matters for ongoing debates about the equity of EU research funding. Smaller member states have long voiced concerns that framework programmes disproportionately reward large, well-established research systems, and this analysis provides granular evidence with which such concerns can now be assessed and, potentially, addressed through targeted policy interventions.

The technical achievement underlying these findings deserves attention in its own right. Assigning standardised keywords to research projects has traditionally been a labour-intensive exercise requiring expert panels to read and code hundreds of project abstracts, a process that is slow, expensive and difficult to reproduce. Large language models, by contrast, can process project descriptions at scale and apply a consistent classification scheme, making it feasible to update the mapping continuously as new projects are funded. The authors’ use of this technology within an official Commission analysis signals a broader shift in how public administrations may approach evidence-based policymaking, treating the text of research proposals and reports not as administrative residue but as analysable data.

The practical implications extend beyond academic interest. The European Commission’s cancer projects tool, which provided the data for this study, is designed to give policymakers, researchers and the public a transparent view of EU cancer funding. By demonstrating how the tool’s contents can be systematically analysed, the authors have laid what they describe as the foundation for more strategic planning of EU cancer funding. Identifying thematic clusters makes it possible to spot both overcrowded areas, where additional investment may yield diminishing returns, and neglected ones, where gaps in the portfolio may warrant attention in future work programmes. Mapping collaboration networks similarly allows funders to see which institutions are consistently included and which remain on the margins of European cancer research.

The study arrives at a moment when Europe’s ambition to reduce the cancer burden is codified in policy initiatives spanning research, health systems and digital infrastructure. What this analysis makes clear is that ambition is backed by substantial and traceable resources: more than 840 million euros distributed across 102 projects spanning three complementary programmes. What it also makes clear is that the distribution of those resources follows identifiable structural patterns, shaped by population size, institutional networks and thematic fashion. By making those patterns visible, the Joint Research Centre team has transformed a collection of individual project records into a strategic instrument, one that could help ensure that the next generation of European cancer funding is planned not by habit or accident, but by design.

Subject of Research: Analysis of European Union cancer research funding across Horizon Europe, EU4Health and the Digital Europe Programme

Article Title: Unveiling European cancer funding: insights from the European Commission’s cancer projects tool

Article References: Puertas Gallardo, A., Brunetto, A., & Stepien, M. (2026). Unveiling European cancer funding: insights from the European Commission’s cancer projects tool. Health Research Policy and Systems. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-026-01535-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12961-026-01535-9

Keywords: cancer funding, Horizon Europe, EU4Health, Digital Europe Programme, large language models, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, cancer policy, research collaboration, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, health research policy