Human Capital Development and Responsible Cancer Research

Abstract

As a central driver of sustainable growth, investment in people's skills, health, knowledge, and resilience— human capital—leads to more productivity, flexibility, and innovation. Updating education curricula, upskilling, and reskilling will be needed to address talent shortages. Reskilling and upskilling means in-demand technology skills, critical thinking, problem-solving and newly emerging skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility. Moreover, the workforce should be valued as an asset not as an expense and the value of talent should be reset. As cancer is an important barrier to increasing life expectancy worldwide and the global cancer burden is expected to increase by 2040, training and developing the workforce who treat cancer or conduct cancer research is a fundamental goal. In Egypt's universities, all oncology departments' mission comprise education including on the job training, research conduction, and community service including managing patients. Cancer research areas comprise biology, genomics, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. For research to be ethical (responsible research), it should follow international ethical principles and the Clinical Medical Research Regulation Law (the Egyptian law). In this article, I will review what has been done in human capital development, responsible cancer research, electronic cancer research registry and research infrastructure during the last two years in Clinical Oncology and Nuclear Medicine Department, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams university and outline our future plan along with our needs from Egyptian Scientists and Expatriates to achieve 2030 vision.