Télévie at 25: More Cancer, Fewer Deaths

Today is Télévie day in Luxembourg. The 25th edition. Across the country, volunteers are manning phone lines, collecting donations, and doing that very Luxembourgish thing of turning charity into a communal event. Centres de promesses in Feulen, Bissen, and Rodange are packed. The counter is climbing.

I've been reading the coverage, and the headline number stopped me: around 3'000 new cancer diagnoses per year in Luxembourg, and experts estimate that could increase by half again by 2040. More cancer, not less. But here's the counterintuitive part: deaths are declining.

That paradox is worth thinking about.

The Paradox Explained

More diagnoses doesn't mean cancer is getting more aggressive. It means we're finding it. Better screening, earlier detection, more awareness. A cancer caught at stage 1 that would have been missed twenty years ago is now a statistic, and also a survivor.

Dr Guy Berchem, who has been with Télévie since the beginning, points to decades of research into how cancer actually functions. The "ultimate cure" doesn't exist yet, but what does exist is something almost as remarkable: patients with far better chances of survival than anyone had a right to expect even a decade ago.

Immunotherapy: Training the Body to Fight

The biggest shift has been from attacking cancer directly to helping the body attack it. Chemotherapy is a blunt instrument. It kills cancer cells, sure, but it takes healthy cells with them. Immunotherapy works differently: it boosts the immune system so your own body recognizes and destroys the cancer.

But it's not a universal solution. Dr Bassam Janji, a researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Health for over 20 years, explains the problem: some tumours don't have immune cells nearby. The immune system can't fight what it can't see. His team's research focuses on bringing immune cells into the tumour environment, then strengthening the immune response so those cells can do their job.

This is slow, painstaking work. The kind of work Télévie funds.

The Cancers We Still Can't Touch

Some cancers have become almost manageable. Testicular cancer, thyroid cancer, Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Others remain as brutal as ever. Glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, still has no effective treatment.

Dr Sabrina Fritah has spent over a decade researching how glioblastoma cells evade treatment. Cancer cells adapt. They change. They develop mechanisms to resist the drugs that should kill them. Her work focuses on identifying those changes, then finding ways to block them so tumours can't just shrug off treatment.

The goal is no longer one universal solution. It's personalized treatment. Understanding how each patient's cancer behaves, then building a therapeutic combination that targets not just the tumour, but the specific escape mechanisms that particular cancer uses.

Why a Country of 670'000 People Matters

Luxembourg is small. Everyone knows that. But small countries can do things large ones struggle with: coordinate. The collaboration between the Luxembourg Institute of Health, the national cancer registry, and clinical teams means research here moves from lab to patient faster than in bigger, more fragmented systems.

Télévie has raised money for 25 years. That money funds the slow, unglamorous research that doesn't make headlines but eventually changes survival curves. Immunotherapy didn't appear overnight. It came from decades of basic research into how immune cells interact with tumours. The kind of research that gets defunded first and celebrated last.

The Counter

As I write this, the Télévie counter is still climbing. Volunteers are still answering phones. Grand Duke Guillaume visited the centres today. It's the 25th edition, and the story it tells is surprisingly optimistic: more diagnoses, fewer deaths. Not because cancer got weaker, but because research got better.

That's worth paying for.