Our research in Glasgow

Last year, we spent nearly £19 million in Glasgow. We work in partnership with the Universities of Glasgow and StrathclydeNHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and our Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, enabling the smartest minds to work together on improving outcomes for people with cancer all over the world.

In Glasgow, our dedicated researchers are focusing on pancreatic, bowel and liver cancer.

Glasgow was previously home to our Cancer Research UK Glasgow Centre, but now forms part of our Cancer Research UK Scotland Centre, delivering world-leading research that accelerates the transition of lab-based discovery to the clinic for the benefit of people affected by cancer. 

 

Finding the right treatments for differing types of bowel cancer

Professor Owen Sansom

Glasgow scientists are looking to identify new and repurposed drugs so that patients can be stratified into different treatment groups for bowel cancer.

Detecting liver cancer earlier

Liver cancer

Working with international collaborators, a Glasgow team are using state-of-the-art techniques to decipher subtle changes in blood biomarkers to detect if a person has developed liver cancer. 

What we are doing now 

As one of seven Cancer Research UK RadNet Centres of Excellence, scientists and doctors in Glasgow are focusing on improving radiotherapy for patients with hard-to-treat cancers and cancers with poor prognosis, such as lung, brain, pancreatic, and head and neck cancers.

Our network of Experimental Cancer Medicine Centres (ECMCs) are unique partnerships between local NHS Trusts and universities that bring together lab scientists and cancer doctors to speed up the flow of ideas and new treatments from the lab to the clinic. The Glasgow ECMC has expertise in running clinical studies in both adults and children.

The Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit delivers innovative and practice-changing clinical research that impacts the care and outcomes for cancer patients in the UK and across the world. The unit operates within the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde hospital, the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre.

Based at Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute is one of Cancer Research Horizons' drug discovery sites, which has extensive experience and diverse expertise in small molecule drug discovery. The team works in collaboration with researchers seeking to translate their research and develop new targets that could become the cancer treatments of the future.

In Glasgow

  • 6,800 people are diagnosed with cancer each year.
  • 53% of bowel, breast, lung cancers are diagnosed early.
  • We spent nearly £19m on life-saving research in 2020/21.

We receive no government funding for our research. Our life-saving work relies on the money you give us.

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