Cancer Research UK is the world's largest independent cancer research charity, funding the Crick, ICR, Manchester, Cambridge, and the STAMPEDE and TRACERx trials.
Cancer Research UK is the world's largest independent cancer research charity, spending over four hundred million pounds a year and funding the Crick, the Institute of Cancer Research and the Manchester and Cambridge institutes, as well as trials including STAMPEDE, TRACERx, Add-Aspirin, BILCAP and INTERLACE. It runs the CRUK Centres network, the Cancer Grand Challenges with the NCI, clinical trials units and the British Journal of Cancer, and its commercial arm Cancer Research Horizons has its own record; Charles Swanton, Caroline Dive, Michelle Mitchell and Dame Deborah James are among the people linked. OnCo connects it to bottlenecks on funding that follows fashion, neglected metastasis research and no incentive to repurpose cheap drugs. Whether a charity can fund infrastructure that governments will not is the standing question. Its research infrastructure page names four core-funded institutes (the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute in Glasgow, the Cambridge Institute, the Manchester Institute and the Francis Crick Institute) and seven centres (Cambridge, City of London with King's College London, UCL, Barts and the Crick, Convergence Science with the Institute of Cancer Research and Imperial College London, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford and Scotland across Edinburgh and Glasgow); those with records are linked below, as are the centre directors OnCo lists and the trials whose sponsor field names the charity. The Bowelbabe Fund is linked below.
Cancer biologist who directs the Cancer Research UK Convergence Science Centre, the joint Institute of Cancer Research and Imperial College London programme bringing engineering and physical sciences into cancer research.
Built small-cell lung cancer models from circulating tumour cells and leads the Manchester institute.
Leads TRACERx, the study that follows lung cancers as they evolve, and showed how air pollution can trigger lung cancer without new mutations.
Diagnosed with bowel cancer at 35, she spent five years telling people to check their poo, co-hosted the BBC's You, Me and the Big C, and raised over £11 million for Cancer Research UK in the weeks before her death in 2022.
Iain Foulkes directs the research portfolio of Cancer Research UK.
Michelle Mitchell is chief executive of the world's largest independent cancer research charity.
Epidemiologist who showed HPV vaccination has nearly eliminated cervical cancer in vaccinated English women and leads NHS-Galleri.
Invented the Cytosponge, a swallowable sponge-on-a-string that finds Barrett's oesophagus without endoscopy.
Ruth Plummer is an early-phase trialist who ran the first-in-human study of a PARP inhibitor.
Scientist who directs the Cancer Research UK City of London Centre, the multi-institution London hub for cancer biotherapeutics research.
Glasgow cancer biologist who directs the CRUK Scotland Institute and is Scientific Director of the CRUK Scotland Centre, known for mouse models of colorectal and pancreatic cancer.
Edinburgh medical oncologist and ovarian cancer researcher who is Clinical Director of the CRUK Scotland Centre.
Medical oncologist who co-directs Oxford Cancer, the city-wide partnership between the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospitals.
The authors' conclusion is that ibrutinib-rituximab should be considered a new standard-of-care option for first-line treatment of older patients with mantle-cell lymphoma. The subgroup split means it is clearly better than R-CHOP and roughly equivalent to bendamustine-rituximab.
The first prospective test of acting on ctDNA in triple-negative disease, and a negative one: with a quarterly, single-mutation assay the window between detectable DNA and visible metastasis was too short to intervene. Later designs use tumour-informed assays, earlier sampling and drugs with more single-agent activity.
Relapse after surgery is driven by particular subclones that can be identified in the primary tumour and tracked in blood, which argues for evolution-aware adjuvant strategies. The pollution finding reframes carcinogenesis: some agents promote already-mutant cells rather than causing mutations.
Durability is what makes endoscopic screening cost-effective: one procedure at 55 buys nearly two decades of protection, which is the argument for long intervals rather than frequent tests.
Men diagnosed with prostate cancer that has already spread, or that is locally advanced and high risk, should start abiraterone (or another androgen-receptor pathway inhibitor) at the same time as testosterone suppression rather than waiting for resistance. This roughly halves the risk of death over several years. The same platform later showed that docetaxel chemotherapy and, in high-volume metastatic disease, triple therapy also help, and that abiraterone benefits men with high-risk disease treated with radiotherapy.
Lung cancers keep evolving after they form, and it is ongoing chromosomal instability rather than the number of mutations that best predicts who will relapse. This gives a rationale for targeting the earliest (clonal) drivers and neoantigens and for tracking evolution in blood after surgery.
The UK's own evidence that the disparity is not only American and not only about access: within the NHS, with equal chemotherapy use, young Black women had more triple-negative disease and worse survival. It anchors the disparities idea on the triple-negative page and the UK and NHS page.
Chemotherapy works in receptor-negative disease at least as well as in receptor-positive disease in proportional terms, and because triple-negative absolute risk is high the absolute gain is large; this is why anthracycline and taxane backbone survived into KEYNOTE-522 and why SCARLET now asks whether the anthracycline can go.
Shares Publish per-patient trial cost benchmarks and target halving them, A public registry of unanswered clinical questions linked to funding calls, Disclose R&D and manufacturing costs of publicly funded cancer drugs to get coverage, Grant progress reports must list what did not work.
Shares Cancer Research UK Convergence Science Centre, A non-profit phase 1b combination unit that any drug owner can use, ABC-07, c-TRAK TN.
Shares A RECOVERY-style permanent platform trial of cheap drugs added to cancer care, DETERMINE arm 04: trastuzumab with pertuzumab in HER2-amplified or mutated rare cancers, A perpetual platform trial in every major cancer, funded as infrastructure, A national platform trial that every ctDNA-positive patient can join.
Shares Pool every multi-sample tumour genome into one open evolution atlas, A national rapid research autopsy network for end-stage cancer, Bank three spatially separate tumour blocks from every resection, Wellcome.
Shares Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust / Imperial College London Cancer Research, Macmillan Cancer Support, Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre / CRUK Scotland Institute, University Hospital Southampton / Centre for Cancer Immunology.