Cancer Prevention and Control

Estimates based on a broad range of scientific evidence indicate that more than 50% of cancers can be prevented. Approximately 50 million lives worldwide could be saved this decade by implementing known, effective preventive strategies. However, disseminating these life-saving prevention messages and enabling sustainable, cancer control initiatives requires sophisticated, cooperative efforts.

The Cancer Prevention and Control Platform drives impact on behalf of MD Anderson’s mission to end cancer through the lenses of both cancer prevention and control, and community and social impact, broadly. This work represents MD Anderson’s primary, focused activation of expertise in the science of public health practice, community-based dissemination of evidence-based practices, applied implementation science, and impact measurement for community-facing initiatives.

Our Goals

• Accelerate the development, dissemination and amplification of evidence-based strategies, community services, policy interventions, and knowledge targeting measurable reductions in cancer incidence and mortality at a population level.
• Strengthen health systems and clinical environments across a range of evidence-based actions critical to cancer prevention, early detection and access to services.
• Build and implement evidence-based practice at scale through place-based initiatives in health within priority regions/communities with long-standing inequity and high disease burden.
• Design, implement and measure targeted initiatives which address upstream social drivers of health (e.g. food insecurity), key risk factor areas (e.g. HPV, tobacco), and gaps for populations who are medically underserved communities (e.g. hereditary cancers).
• Build deep capacity of organizational partners and health systems critical to execution in program evaluation, measurement, strategy, governance, program delivery, fund development, leadership, staffing and financial sustainability.

The platform is guided by the ideology that research advances in cancer medicine must be shared widely and translated, practically and rapidly, into health systems, communities and daily life. By working closely with the Moon Shot teams, we're ensuring that our prevention strategies impact population-level health outcomes on a transformative scale. Our current key initiatives include:

• Place-Based Investments in Health
  *Be Well Communities™
• Health System Strengthening for Cancer Control
  *Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) Vaccination Initiative
  *Breast Cancer gene (BRCA) Quality Improvement Dissemination Program
• Initiative Acceleration
  *Health Equity Research and Practice
  *Texas Health Equity Alliance for Breast Cancer (THEAL)
• Impact Evaluation and Public Health Intelligence
  *Impact Evaluation Core
  *Joint Center on Geospatial Analysis and Health