American Joint Committee on Cancer

The mission of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) is to create and promote a classification of cancer patient groups that accurately predicts outcomes by incorporating the Tumor, Nodes, Metastasis staging system (a classification of tumors by their anatomic site and histology) and newer data in a timely and dynamic process. Its goal is to formulate and publish systems of classification of cancer, including staging and end results reporting, that will be acceptable to and used by the medical profession to facilitate the management of cancer care.

The AJCC was formally established in 1959 and consists of six founding organizations, four sponsoring organizations, and seven liaison organizations. These organizations' missions or goals are consistent with or complimentary to those of the AJCC and the organizations demonstrate involvement in cancer epidemiology, patient care, cancer control, cancer registration, professional education, research, and biostatistics.

Partnership Activities

DCPC and AJCC are working together with other groups to develop the Collaborative Staging (CS) system, an innovative approach to collecting stage data uniformly in cancer registries throughout the United States. This new system will replace separate data collection by American Joint Committee on Cancer's Tumor, Nodes, Metastasis staging system, the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results' (SEER) Extent of Disease (EOD) coding scheme, and two versions of a summary staging system used in many state central cancer registries. The new CS system involves collecting many discrete elements of data that can be combined in multiple ways to derive the stages needed for data analysis.

American Joint Committee on Cancer Executive Office
633 N. Saint Clair
Chicago, IL 60611
Telephone: (312) 202-5290
Fax: (312) 202-5009
www.cancerstaging.org*

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