Although the aetiology of cancer in humans and laboratory model organisms has received ample attention, many aspects of cancer remain poorly understood or seriously understudied. For instance, it is now widely recognized that cancer not only affects humans, but it occurs in most species of the animal kingdom, from hydra to whales. In addition, cancer susceptibility and resistance is extremely variable across species with some of them rarely developing this pathology while, in others, over 50% of individuals die of cancer-related pathologies. Understanding the vulnerability or resistance of animals to cancerous processes will likely provide key insights into oncogenic processes and could potentially revolutionize human and veterinary cancer medicine. In other words, wildlife could constitute a new source of information and inspiration to identify new mechanisms to treat cancer. In addition, while ecologists have ignored oncogenic phenomena, their roles on ecosystem functioning could in fact be significant due to carcinogenesis influencing individual competitive and dispersal abilities, susceptibility to pathogens and vulnerability to predation. These processes are currently exacerbated given that most, if not all, ecosystems of our planet are now polluted with mutagenic substances. Knowledge of wildlife cancer is therefore becoming increasingly relevant also for the field of conservation. 

The urgent nature of the abovementioned aims calls for a need to boost and amplify the efforts of researchers working on wildlife cancer. We propose that this emerging field would be more productive if researchers were affiliated and organized within a European network, where ideas, samples, approaches, methodologies and students could be transferred between labs.  The network is bringing together researchers currently working on different subtopics in the field : comparative oncology, transmissible cancers, pollution and wildlife cancer, and host-tumor interactions. We have so far 70 persons and numerous students and postdocs from 10 European countries and 21 universities interested to join the network. Some of these universities have mentioned their interest to potentially participate in the funding of this network.  

The goal of this network is to bring together the community of researchers working on wildlife cancer in Europe. To this end, we will make this community visible for the public and the national and European funding agencies though the development of a new website describing the new network. This visibility will further promote the field of wildlife cancer, raise awareness of this emerging research topic, and invite other countries, universities and researchers to join. We will also organize workshops every two years to stimulate the development of new collaborations between researchers. We will invite Master and PhD students and postdoc researchers to these workshops (with a particular attention to help fund their trips) to help them develop their own networks of collaborators, and to find opportunities for short stays of few weeks/months or postdocs in labs affiliated to this network. During these workshops, recent research results will be presented by the different labs. An important aspect of the network meetings is to agree on research protocols applied to different wild model species for studying cancer, to allow better comparison between study results. We will also discuss the possibility to develop a new database that regroups information on the samples collected in the different research groups to stimulate the sharing of samples between labs. These meetings will also lead to joint manuscripts presenting ideas for developing the field, and potentially also joint applications for network research funding.