History & Honorary Members

Founded in September 1982, AORTIC was the fruit of a lunch break discussion during the 13th International Cancer Congress held in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. in the same year. Reminiscing on the record of excellence in collaborative research, treatment, and education in cancer in the 1950s and the 1960s at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria) and Makerere University (Uganda) our founders recalled that those institutions had been centers of attraction for international cancer researchers, for example, following the identification of a childhood cancer which we know today as Burkitt lymphoma.

AORTIC held its inaugural conference in the City of Lome, Togo, West Africa in 1983 and was a small but vibrant community until the late 1980s where unrest and other challenges across our Continent made travel and convening difficult and saw emmigration rates of adademics rise. In 2000, a group of expatriate African physicians, scientists and motivated friends joined forces to reactivate AORTIC as a professional network focused building capacities in research and provision of cancer services. Since then, AORTIC has held its biennial conference and contributed to putting cancer prevention and control on the African policy agenda as well as working in partnership with Union for International Cancer Control and NCD Alliance to secure the High Level Meeting on noncommunicable diseases in 2011 and the subsequent global action plan and monitoring framwork that shapes national work today.