Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Britain’s ability to benefit fully from a “golden age” in cancer drug discovery will be compromised without further investment, the head of Cancer Research UK has warned.
The organisation on Thursday launched a campaign to raise £400mn to fund research into potential breakthroughs — the biggest appeal for philanthropic funding ever mounted by a British charity.
The campaign is backed by a group of more than 50 leading scientists and clinicians, including three Nobel Prize winners, who are calling on high value donors and philanthropists to fund life-saving research to tackle the disease.
Michelle Mitchell, CRUK chief executive, told the Financial Times that Britain was “genuinely in a golden era of cancer research, on the brink of discoveries that could transform how we understand and treat cancer”.
However, she warned that currently finances were “the rate limiting step” in what could be achieved and the UK risked falling behind other countries that spent far more.
“The £400mn would make a huge difference in powering progress” on “a defining health issue of our time”, she added.
The UK was unusually reliant on charitable funding for cancer research, Mitchell noted. Excluding research funded by industry, charities funded 62 per cent, against government’s 38 per cent. This meant a significant proportion of cancer research was only possible because of public donations, she added.
In contrast, the US government funded five times more cancer research per capita than the UK government, and in Norway state funding was more than 2.5 times higher. In Canada and France, the ratio of state-to-charity funding for cancer was 3:1 and 2:1, respectively.
The UK government said in a statement: “Research and the life sciences are crucial in the fight against cancer, which is why we invest £1bn per year through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). In 2022/23, NIHR research expenditure for all cancers was £121.8mn.”
The National Health Service had seen and treated record numbers of cancer patients over the past two years, and one-year survival rates had improved from 65.6 per cent in 2005 to 74.6 per cent in 2020, it added.
CRUK cited a recent report by think-tank Onward which said the wealthiest 10 per cent of households now donated half as much as a proportion of their income as those in the poorest 10 per cent, suggesting they could do much more to support charitable causes worldwide.
Leading figures from the field, said in an open letter to accompany the campaign launch that within 16 years the number of cancer diagnoses globally was predicted to increase by 50 per cent.
The money raised by the appeal would be used to support the Francis Crick Institute, the global cancer research initiative Cancer Grand Challenges and innovation that would translate into effective therapies and diagnostics for patients, Mitchell said.
Read the full article here