Recommendations from the ASCO Academic Global Oncology Task Force

In recognition of the rising incidence and mortality of cancer in low- and middle-resource settings, as well as the increasingly international profile of its membership, ASCO has prioritized efforts to enhance its engagement at a global level. Among the recommendations included in the 2016 Global Oncology Leadership Task Force report to the ASCO Board of Directors was that ASCO should promote the recognition of global oncology as an academic field. The report suggested that ASCO could serve a role in transitioning global oncology from an informal field of largely voluntary activities to a more formal discipline with strong research and well-defined training components. As a result of this recommendation, in 2017, ASCO formed the Academic Global Oncology Task Force (AGOTF) to guide ASCO’s contributions toward formalizing the field of global oncology. The AGOTF was asked to collect and analyze key issues and barriers toward the recognition of global oncology as an academic discipline, with an emphasis on training, research, and career pathways, and produce a set of recommendations for ASCO action. The outcome of the AGOTF was the development of recommendations designed to advance the status of global oncology as an academic discipline.