Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and Mongolia cover an immense section of Asia and although relatively sparsely populated the total inhabitants number well in excess of 100 million. Furthermore, there is an increasing tendency for urbanization of the populations, which in many cases are growing. The ethnic make-up is diverse, with various degrees of admixture of Russians to the Turkish, Mongolian and other indigenous peoples of the region, and there is evidence of major variation in the burden of different cancers among the groups, although oesophageal and gastric neoplasias are relatively prevalent in common. Clearly there is a need for cooperation for cancer and other chronic disease prevention and the presence of Russian as a shared language of science, commerce and industry means that there should be no major communication difficulties. However, collaborative efforts at present are limited and the research output is low, even in the non-English literature. Here we focus on published work from the individual countries, as assessed by PubMed searches using the country name with cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic syndrome and diabetes as search terms, with an especial focus on epidemiology, environmental carcinogenicity and screening. One major aim is to identify active groups with an interest in participation in a regional meeting and collaborative research, so that a coordinated approach to granting agencies can be made to fund such a collective endeavour.