On Sept. 27, 2018, St.ﾠJude Children’s Hospital and the World Health Organization announced a five-year collaboration to transform cancer care by curing at least 60% of children with six of the most common kinds of cancer worldwide by 2030.

This collaboration seeds a global initiative that will bring together stakeholders in childhood cancer from around the world to increase access to care for children with cancer, enhance quality of care by developing national centers of excellence and regional satellites, and influence the integration of childhood cancer into national policies to ensure the greatest chance of survival for all affected children.

Each year, approximately 300,000 children and adolescents are expected to be diagnosed with cancer. About 8 in 10 of these children live in low- and middle-income countries, where cure rates are often estimated at only 20 percent. This is in stark contrast to higher-income countries, where cure rates exceed 80 percent, largely because of the medical advances and specialized multidisciplinary care for children with cancer established over the past 50 years. This divide in survival rates between higher-income countries and low- and middle-income countries is among the greatest disparities in health outcomes worldwide.