If you want a reality check on oncology’s grand promises, you fly to Cape Town, not Cannes. ESMO Summit Africa 2025 is where guidelines meet the constraints of the real world—clinic bandwidth, pathology turnaround, drug availability, and whether your patient can afford the taxi. The energy this year: take global best practice, strip it down to what actually works, then scale it across fragile systems.
The theme: pragmatism > perfection
The plenary wave focused on what African oncologists can deploy this quarter: streamlined regimens, smarter triage, and diagnostics that don’t collapse under power cuts or reagent delays. Precision medicine is here, but it’s being localized—variant panels tuned for regional prevalence; digital pathology networks that share scarce expertise; and trial designs that accept logistically messy reality.
Where the frontier is moving
- AI‑assisted pathology and radiology are no longer novelty demos. Remote reads and active‑learning models are cutting report times and helping junior clinicians prioritize cases. Crucially, programs are embedding human‑in‑the‑loop QA and offline modes to survive patchy connectivity.
- Chemo‑lite protocols—hypofractionation in radiotherapy, shorter adjuvant courses, and oral alternatives—are emerging as the fastest path to better outcomes when infusion seats and linear accelerators are the choke point.
- Trial participation from the Global South is being reframed as a capability, not a burden. Expect more pragmatic trials with simplified endpoints, community follow‑up, and mobile health ops to reduce loss to follow‑up.
Supply chain truths (and hacks)
The hallway conversations were blunt: sterile compounding capacity, cold chain, and diagnostic reagent stockouts—not fancy molecules—decide survival curves. The clever workarounds:
- Regional procurement clubs for generics and biosimilars to stabilize pricing.
- Hub‑and‑spoke lab models that preserve quality while cutting costs.
- Nurse‑led navigation and digital reminders to lift adherence without adding headcount.
What buyers asked vendors all week
- Can your device or assay run offline and sync later?
- What’s the consumables cost per patient at our volumes?
- Does your data model export cleanly into our national registries? Vendors who answered in numbers, not adjectives, won the meetings.
Founder notes
If you’re a startup, your Africa playbook in 2025 is co‑build with ministries and leading cancer institutes, ship with training and maintenance baked in, and anchor your business case on reduced time‑to‑diagnosis and retention in care. The optics of “pilotitis” won’t fly here—bring implementation partners and a road map to reimbursement.Dates & place: 7–9 February 2025, Cape Town.
