By Dr. Tracey Adams and Annwen Jones OBE, Co-Chairs, Global Expert Advisory Group on Ovarian Cancer
23 July 2025
Since our launch on World Ovarian Cancer Day in May, the Global Expert Advisory Group on Ovarian Cancer has issued a Statement of Intent and identified three priority areas for action that we believe will improve the lives of women with, and at risk of, ovarian cancer globally.
The Group has also prioritized an overarching objective – to set a target to reduce the global ovarian cancer mortality rate (the number of women who die from ovarian cancer each year). This is a much-needed target that we believe is necessary in order to mobilise efforts to save lives.
Policy makers, globally and nationally, set targets across a range of health and social care areas that serve as a metric for progress. Targets can drive tangible actions that result in increased investment in research, treatment advancements and tackling barriers to access. As one of the leading causes of death across the world, setting mortality targets in cancer is critical, as they provide measurable goals to improve survival rates and pinpoint areas that need addressing.
Targets are currently used to measure the success of ongoing global strategies to which the World Health Organization (WHO) member states have made a collective commitment, such as the 2020 Cervical Cancer Elimination Initiative and the 2021 Global Breast Cancer Initiative (GBCI). For example, the GBCI aims to reduce breast cancer mortality by 2.5% per year, which over a 20-year period can save 2.5 million lives supported by an implementation framework for multiple stakeholders “that can facilitate health systems strengthening and reduce inequities in women’s health throughout their life cycles.”
The metric often used by policy makers is the Age-standardised rate (ASR) of deaths per 100,000 people in the general population within a specific time period. The ASR allows for comparisons to be made between different regions within a country or between countries as a whole, by taking into account the differences in the age structure of the populations in question, so that a more representative picture is described.
Setting a global mortality rate for ovarian cancer is long overdue and would bring this women’s cancer into line with breast and cervical cancers, encourage synergies with these initiatives as well as raising levels of awareness among healthcare professionals, national health systems and patients. The target will be particularly important for low-and middle-income countries given that the burden of ovarian cancer will fall overwhelmingly on these countries over the next 25 years. Projections from Globocan indicate that ovarian cancer incidence and mortality are set to jump by 55% and almost 70% respectively by 2050, with low- and middle-income countries bearing the greatest burden.
Research by the World Ovarian Cancer Coalition through its groundbreaking socioeconomic burden study demonstrates the huge societal impact of ovarian cancer with an estimated $70 billion annually in 11 countries, affecting not only national health systems but also the wider economy and the contribution women make in their countries. As such, reducing the impact of ovarian cancer through reductions in mortality rates, will enable more women to contribute to economic and social wellbeing and most importantly, will save lives.
Over the coming months, the Global Expert Advisory Group will work with highly respected individuals and institutions leveraging the Coalition’s global network across a range of countries and settings. The first phase will be to develop a robust protocol with specific research questions to be addressed that will ultimately identify a mortality target that is both ambitious and achievable for all countries. We will engage with epidemiologists, clinicians, health economists, policy experts and patient advocates to understand trends in ovarian cancer mortality and identify health system changes that can be made so that all countries are in a position to transform care and outcomes for women with ovarian cancer.