Five-year cancer plan will invest £1.5billion

A major cancer charity is to invest £300million a year for five years to boost research into the most serious forms of the disease.

Cancer Research UK has today launched its ambitious five-year plan to spend £1.5billion on core areas of science to reduce cancer deaths, including greater investment in those areas where survival rates remain poor.

This includes pancreatic, oesophageal or lung cancer, for which the 10-year survival rate is only around 5%.

The charity will continue to support areas of work such as high quality laboratory and population-based research programmes to improve understanding of cancer, and innovative translational and clinical research to drive scientific discoveries towards improving survival.

The new plan means the charity will establish up to 20 “centres of excellence” across the UK to link research activities with patient care, public engagement and prevention initiatives.

Each centre, most of which will be launched next year, will develop a distinct research strategy and be encouraged to develop key areas of focus.

In the next five years, improvements in early detection and screening will be specifically targeted, allowing doctors to diagnose cancer earlier.

Cancer Research UK’s chief executive Harpal Kumar, said: “Huge progress has been made in beating cancer over the past 30 years, both through reducing the number of people getting cancer in the first place and through doubling survival.

“This has had a significant impact on reducing the number of cancer deaths – and Cancer Research UK has been at the heart of this. But progress has been faster in some areas than others. This strategy focuses our attention on those areas which will have the greatest impact on reducing cancer deaths in the future and on achieving our goals.”

The charity said survival rates had improved for almost all of the common cancers and in many cancer types, the progress has been dramatic.

Breast cancer now has a 20 year survival rate of nearly 70%, while testicular cancer, melanoma and Hodgkin’s disease now all had a 10 year survival rates of over 80%.

In addition, the charity pledged to boost research investment in surgery and radiotherapy.

Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said: “Cancer treatment is increasingly tailored to the individual patient. Through our investments in imaging and biomarker research we will accelerate this process, to maximise the chance of success with an individual patient’s treatment and minimise the wasted time, side effects and costs that result from inappropriate treatment.

“Tailoring treatment in this way presents us with enormous opportunities as well as challenges. This ambitious research strategy puts us in a position to take on these tougher scientific challenges.”

Source: OnMedica