Second, in an era in which combination therapies rather than surgery alone are standard in the curative approach to patients presenting with locally advanced disease, a modern benchmark for 5-year survival approaches 50%, which is also an approximate doubling over a 20 year time period. First, reports of the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP-SURVMARK-2 project), which compare the 1995–1999 to 2011–2014 time periods, highlight an approximate doubling of 5-year survival for both OAC and SCC across seven high-income countries, with the greatest impact in patients under 75 years of age. While historically viewed as a cancer with a dismal prognosis, encouraging trends have emerged across several domains. Oesophageal cancer, comprising mainly oesophageal adenocarcinoma (OAC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), is the seventh most common cancer worldwide, and is responsible for ~450,000 deaths per year.