The major purpose of this conference is to provide those involved in the analysis and interpretation of cancer data with the knowledge and tools to think in terms of the proportion of patients with cancer who will not succumb to their disease. This is a major departure from the conventional ways of looking at such data that focus on the length of time until the patient's death. These methods seek to estimate the proportion still surviving as a function of time, compare treatment regimens with respect to survival time, and study the effects of various demographic factors and disease characteristics on the distribution of survival time. However, a strong argument can be made for the preposition that the most important questions concerning survival of cancer and its treatment are not whether a given treatment increases median survival time from x months to x+delta months, but whether that treatment impacts favorably on the probability that a patient will be cured of his/her disease and thus not die from it at all. The attendees of this conference will have the opportunity to hear presentations by some of the leading experts in this area. They will take from this experience a newly found appreciation of the advantages of looking at cancer survival data in terms of the cure rate and the knowledge to do so. It is expected that will, in turn, result in more informative analyses of cancer research data. Another important purpose of this conference is to provide scientists who are leaders in this field with the opportunity to meet with others having similar interests and to exchange ideas and approaches to the problem of cure rate estimation. It is expected that the contacts that time place during this conference will have a lasting and positive influence on the work in this field.
