The Republic of Moldova adheres to the Global Platform for Access to Medicines for the Treatment of Childhood Cancer. On Thursday, 12 June, Health Minister Ala Nemerenco and Natasha Azzopardi Muscat, Director for Policies and National Health Systems at the WHO Regional Office for Europe, signed an agreement to this effect. The Government plans to deliver the first batch of free medicines for Moldovan children with cancer in Q4 2025.
The GPACCM Platform is a global mechanism created by WHO and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It aims to establish worldwide solutions and expand access to essential medicines for treating childhood cancer.
Within the next five years, the platform will deliver safe, effective, and high-quality cancer medicines with no financial barriers, reaching approximately 120,000 children across 50 low- and middle-income countries. It also strives to raise the childhood cancer survival rate to 60% by 2030.
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Worldwide, 400,000 children and adolescents develop cancer annually, 90% of whom live in low- and middle-income countries. In high-income countries, over 80% of children with cancer are cured, compared to less than 30% in low- and middle-income nations. Avoidable deaths still occur due to late, incorrect, or missed diagnoses, obstacles to accessing care, treatment abandonment, and deaths caused by treatment toxicity and relapse.
“The Republic of Moldova has been selected among the six countries to join this mechanism in 2025, thanks to our country’s commitment to controlling childhood cancer and our successes in the Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer (2018). Each year, we diagnose approximately 100 new cases of pediatric cancer. Although the five-year survival rate for pediatric cancer in Moldova is about 60%—an improvement—it still falls below the regional average,” the Ministry of Health stated in its press release.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has committed to investing 200 million dollars over the next six years in the GPACCM platform, partnering with WHO and collaborating with UNICEF and the PAHO Strategic Fund.