Headline message

There will be better treatments with fewer side effects

Detailed goal

Treatments that accurately target the cancer and have few serious side effects will be available for at least half of all patients.

Background information and strategies

How we will measure this

Every three years, experts such as the National Cancer Research Institute Clinical Study Groups will review treatment options for each of the 20 most common cancers. They will identify the proportion of patients who can receive targeted treatments, with few serious side effects.

The current situation

Around 25% of patients currently have targeted, optimally delivered or minimally invasive therapy options available to them as a first treatment. These options include therapies such as trastuzumab (Herceptin®), hormone treatments for breast and prostate cancer, brachytherapy, conformal radiotherapy and laparoscopic surgery.

We will achieve this goal by:

• Growing our drug discovery and development operations to ensure that basic research is turned into new treatments quickly
• Supporting research into high-risk or innovative treatments that offer substantial benefits, for example for rarer cancers
• Maintaining a best-in-class technology transfer and commercialisation arm to ensure that patients benefit from all publicly-funded cancer research
• Supporting the development of new treatment strategies aimed at improving survival, quality of life and patient convenience, including chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, or combination therapies
• Maintaining and developing infrastructure to support large-scale clinical trials, through our network of Clinical Trials Units and Experimental Cancer Medicine Centres
• Continuing to promote, support and develop clinical training initiatives
• Supporting trials to understand which patients benefit from which treatments
• Promoting the best treatment strategies to Government, commercial organisations and those responsible for cancer care
• Establishing a UK-wide network of Cancer Research Centres to improve knowledge flow from laboratories to patients and vice versa.

We hope this work will also be supported by:

Other research organisations

• Conducting research and development alongside or in partnership with Cancer Research UK

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies

• Investing in the discovery and development of new treatments for patients
• Working with Cancer Research UK through schemes such as our Clinical Development Partnerships initiative, which aims to increase the number of successful new treatments for cancer by taking undeveloped anti-cancer agents from industry and putting them into clinical trials

Government

• Developing an NHS culture that embraces cancer research
• Enhancing support for cancer clinical trials, including increased patient recruitment.