Re-beginnings are never far from planned endings. On cancer it’s obvious.
Certainly Thierry Philip no longer walks the corridors of hospitals with a stethoscope around his neck to treat patients. Paradoxically, this is the only activity that he really gave up when he was appointed to the Curie Institute in 2014.
But this trained pediatric oncologist who has also treated adults follows with quiet pride the journey of his son Charles-André who has just obtained his accreditation to direct research (HDR) in gynecology, the key to bringing together the medical excellence and fundamental research, obtained 10 years after his thesis.
With medical succession being ensured by descendants, Thierry Philip, who seemed to have taken his foot off the gas a little by leaving the presidency of the board of directors of the Curie Institute in Paris last May, immediately founded a company of which he is the only employee and which travels throughout France, Europe and the world to advise cancer centers in their development strategies to fight the disease. He comes back from Tanzania, Moldova or Avignon like normal Lyonnais come home from work in TCL.
He is director or former director of a series of institutions which aim to find the best way to treat cancer: starting from the hospital and care to go back to research and develop it (as he did to Léon Bérard), or on the contrary starting from research to develop patient care, as he managed at the Institut Curie.
In all cases it promotes the logic of certification of cancer care units: “You have a series of criteria, quality of care, quality of support, quality of research. You take the hospital in Chisinau (the capital of Moldova) they have green signals almost everywhere, it’s in the research part that remains to be progressed”. When, in France, cancer institutes refuse to embark on the accreditation process: “It’s often that there is a logic of people that gets in the way”.
He did his thesis on Burkitt lymphoma – the most aggressive cancer in the world, often linked to the Epstein-Barr virus – which is found mainly in equatorial Africa. Today Thierry Philip is working with Tanzania to help implement a policy for the early treatment of cancers, and the development of a supply of radiotherapy devices, the whole country having less than the Metropolis of Lyon (he counts the local devices out loud). It’s worse in Gabon (where he doesn’t work): 150 million inhabitants and two devices in total.
It’s all politics, health policy. He rails against the functioning of Europe: “To recover 200,000 euros, you have to fill out a number of documents (he mimes with his hand the height of the pile of documents in question), you spend weeks there, and in the end a comma is missing at one point and you have to start all over again”.
And praises the work of her colleague Véronique Trillet-Lenoir – oncologist, perfect director of Clara before being elected to the European Parliament, who died of cancer at the end of summer 2023: “We miss her, she managed to get Parliament to work on the issue of cancer”.
He is struggling to convince the authorities of the European Union of the importance of promoting a Europe of a major project: reducing “the phenomenal inequalities between East and West” in the fight against cancer. He thinks out loud: “it would still be worth it as a large-scale European project”.
Thierry Philip elected European, Gérard Collomb tried, but came up against the refusal of Martine Aubry then first secretary of the PS which prevented him from appearing on the lists for the 2009 European elections.
Politics in the sense of election by the people, it is indeed possible that there is no longer any question of it in the life of Thierry Philip. Gérard Collomb had promised to give him his place in the 2012 senatorial elections but ultimately kept it for himself.
But for the 2026 municipal elections he said yes to be on the PS list in the 3rd arrondissement. A modest last place compared to that of the mayor he was from 2008 to 2014 after having been vice-president of the Rhône-Alpes region. As he learned management at the French Institute of the same name, he considers that politics is a profession – in the end, after all these battles against cancer, politics will not have become his profession.
But his mantra is indeed political. It’s Jean Jaurès’ phrase that suits him well. He had said it at the funeral of Gérard Collomb, it accompanied him before: “One must have no regrets for the past, no remorse for the present, and unshakeable confidence for the future”.