Digestive Cancers Europe is founded as a Belgian non-profit organisation by Jola Gore-Booth - founder of EuropaColon, Prof. Dr. Eric Van Cutsem - Digestive Oncologist at the University Hospital of Leuven, Belgium and Stefan Gijssels - colon cancer patient and health policy expert.

Since its foundation in 2004, EuropaColon has gradually expanded geographically now representing 40 patient organisations in 30 countries. Jola Gore-Booth, founder of EuropaColon explains:

“Over the last 14 years we have set up alliances with existing patient organisations or set up new patient advocacy groups to make sure that the voice of the patient is heard in every European country. We cover almost all countries now and it’s the right time to also include other digestive cancer patients whose voice was not represented so far”.

The number of patients dying from digestive cancers is excessively high. More than 800,000 people in Europe get diagnosed every year with one of the digestive cancer types and approximately 500,000 patients die every year.

Colorectal cancer is highly preventable and when detected early, overall survival rates are approximately 90%. Unfortunately only 16% of patients get diagnosed at an early stage which demonstrates the strong importance of formal population-based screening programmes.

With the best possible screening 380,000 extra lives could be saved annually and 14 billion Euro saved.

The priority activity is to increase overall survival and save an extra 250,000 lives per year by 2028.