You are changing lives. Your monthly donations are helping to fund research into over 200 types of cancer.
By committing your money, you’re helping us fund advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Because of this, more than one million deaths have been avoided in the UK since the mid-1980s. The breakthroughs start with you.
The latest breakthroughs
Developing Lungvax - the world’s first vaccine to prevent lung cancer
Together with the CRIS Cancer Foundation, we’ve awarded a team of trailblazing researchers £1.7m to develop LungVax – the world’s first vaccine to prevent lung cancer. When lung cancer first starts to develop, the lung cells display tiny ‘red flags’ on their surface called neoantigens. By introducing these harmless neoantigens into the body via the LungVax vaccine, researchers hope they can train the immune system to recognise them on abnormal lung cells, destroying the cells before lung cancer develops.
Moving forward with a pill to prevent breast cancer
Cancer Research UK helped to fund a trial called the IBIS-II, studying the effect of a drug called anastrozole in almost 4,000 post-menopausal women who have a higher-than-average risk of developing breast cancer. In 2023, anastrozole was approved as a preventative option for high-risk women in the UK.
If just 1 in 4 eligible women take anastrozole, it could prevent around 2,000 cases of breast cancer in England.
Trish took part in the IBIS-II trial in 2006
I’m really pleased I took part in the trial and that the results were so good. I’d encourage anyone to take part in a clinical trial. It’s so important charities like Cancer Research UK continue to fund them.
Your regular support helps us continue funding cutting-edge trials like IBIS-II. Read Trish’s full story and more about our trials in our annual supporter update.
Your regular donations allow us to plan future research
Your monthly donations are helping make amazing breakthroughs, but we’ve got a long way to go. With your regular support we can plan ahead and commit to long-term research projects with huge potential to help beat cancer.
Prof. Payam Gammage and a potentially life-saving discovery
Prof. Payam Gammage leads the Mitochondrial Oncogenetics laboratory at the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute.The team realised that certain genetic faults in the mitochondrial DNA of cancer cells can make it easier for our immune system to recognise and kill them.
This is big, because it means we can look at mitochondrial DNA mutations to understand who will benefit from immunotherapy – a type of treatment that harnesses the power of the immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells. If we can predict early on that someone has a good chance of responding to immunotherapy, we can save them years of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Discover more breakthroughs like this and see the life-changing progress your regular donations are making.
Every pound is vital
That’s why we carefully decide where best to spend your money to power progress for people affected by cancer.
For every £1 you donated, 82p was available to beat cancer.
In 2023/24, your regular monthly donations raised an incredible £79m.
These monthly donations allow us to plan and fund future life-saving research.
£5 per month
If 25 people donated £5 a month for one year, scientists could buy a balance to weigh out the exact amount of chemicals that are vital to the success of experiments.
£15 per month
Donating £15 per month for one year could fund a trial testing innovative radiotherapy technique for treating bile duct cancer, for one day.
£25 per month
Donating £25 per month for one year could fund Dr Jennifer Morton’s work on early detection of pancreatic cancer for one day.