International Agency for Research on Cancer
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) (Lyon, France), is part of the World Health Organization (WHO). The objective of IARC is to promote international collaboration in cancer research and bridging continents in their efforts to prevent cancer. The Agency is interdisciplinary, bringing together skills in epidemiology, oncology, laboratory sciences and biostatistics to identify the causes of cancer so that preventive measures (including cancer screening) may be adopted and the burden of disease and associated suffering reduced. A significant feature of the IARC is its expertise in coordinating research across countries and organizations; its independent role as an international organization facilitates this activity. The Agency has a particular interest in conducting research and implementing cancer control in low and middle-income countries through partnerships and collaborations with researchers in these regions. IARC has an extensive experience in coordination of and collaboration to cancer prevention consortia. In particular, in the field of cervical cancer control, IARC contributed with its modelling expertise to the earlier EC funded FP7 projects PREHDICT (242061) and CoheaHr (603019). IARC will be responsible for leading workpackage 5.
Dr. I. Baussano
Dr Iacopo Baussano, infectious diseases physician (M.D. & Sp.ID) and epidemiologist (M.Sc., Ph.D.), has been working as a scientist in the Infections and Cancer Epidemiology (ICE) Group at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, France, since year 2012. Before joining the Agency, Dr. Baussano worked at the Center for Oncologic Prevention in Turin, Italy, and at the School of Public Health of the Imperial College of London, UK. His previous investigations were mostly focused on infectious disease control among vulnerable populations in high-income countries (HICs). In the field of cervical cancer control, he has combined quantitative modelling with field-epidemiology to assess the impact of HPV vaccination and HPV-DNA based screening in both HICs and low/middle-income countries (LMICs). Dr. Baussano is also actively engaged in knowledge and technology transfer from HICs to LMICs. The European Commission and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other donors, have been funding his research program.
Dr. Baussano is IARC’s Principal Investigator within the RISCC consortium.
Mr Damien Georges
Mr Damien Georges is Senior Data Scientist in the Infections and Cancer Epidemiology (ICE) Group at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, France, since 2016. Mr. Georges graduated from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in 2010. He started his career in Alpine Ecology (LECA, CNRS Grenoble, France; School of Geosciences, Edinburgh University, UK; Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Aarhus University, Denmark) as research assistant where he was interested in understanding and predicting the impact of global warming on the distribution of plants. His current position at IARC consists in assisting the scientists of the ICE Group with statistical and modelling support, in describing and estimating the impacts of prevention programs on the incidence of cancers attributable to infectious agents. Mr Georges is actively involved in the development of an open-source model to study the implication of risk-based screening on cervical cancer burden within the RISCC consortium.
Dr Gary Clifford
Dr Gary Clifford has been working in the field of cancer epidemiology for over twenty years, since obtaining his PhD in the UK at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 2001, Dr Clifford was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, France, in the Infections and Cancer Epidemiology (ICE) group, where he has since become senior cancer epidemiologist, and subsequently Group Head. Whilst at IARC, Dr Clifford has been involved in a broad range of international epidemiological studies on infectious agents and cancer, most notably concerning HPV and HIV. Dr Clifford is the author or co-author of over 140 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Ms Irene Man
Irene Man is a researcher in the Infections and Cancer Epidemiology Group (ICE) at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, France. After her training in applied mathematics, she started her PhD on vaccination impact on infectious diseases at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands. Her research now focuses on the modeling of HPV vaccination and cervical screening strategies.
Dr Maxime Bonjour
Dr Maxime Bonjour, public health physician (M.D.) and doctoral scientist in biostatistics, has been working as a doctoral scientist in the Infections and Cancer Epidemiology Group (ICE) at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, France, since year 2019. Before joining the Agency, Dr. Bonjour carried out his residency at University Claude Bernard, Lyon 1. His previous investigations were mostly focused on the clustering of binomial trajectories applied to worldwide HPV prevalence. In the field of cervical cancer, he also worked on the estimation of the lifetime burden of cervical cancer among girls’ birth cohorts worldwide. Maxime was awarded the "Lyon Medical Residents Excellence Award 2020 – Public Health".
Dr Guglielmo Ronco
Dr Guglielmo Ronco (MD), has been a senior visiting scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, France since summer 2018, when he retired from the Centre for Oncologic Prevention (CPO), Turin, Italy, where, for some 30 years, he conducted research mainly in the field of cervical cancer screening. In particular, he was the PI of the NTCC study, a large randomised controlled trial (RCT) providing evidence that HPV-based screening enables earlier diagnosis of cervical cancer precursors than conventional cytology-based screening. NTCC also researched the natural history of HPV infection and cervical cancer, and investigated potential biomarkers, particularly for triaging HPV-positive women. Within the framework of EU-funded collaborative projects, he co-ordinated the pooled analysis of four European RCTs which provided direct evidence that HPV-based screening better protects from cervical cancer than cytology-based screening, giving recommendations on how to implement it. He will be involved in the present project to assess cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and cervical cancer risk, especially as related to age, vaccination, and screening history.
