What we’re doing now
We’re working on more effective, kinder drugs, and developing new therapies for rarer and hard-to-treat cancers, such as brain tumours.
We support more than 100 drug discovery projects across the UK. For example, at the Cancer Research UK Centre for Cancer Therapeutics at The Institute of Cancer Research, Professor Paul Workman and his colleagues are studying faulty molecules in cancer cells and developing new drugs to target them.
And Dr Martin Drysdale in Glasgow and Dr Donald Oglivie in Manchester lead two of our pioneering Drug Discovery programmes, searching for molecules that could become the breakthrough treatments of the future.
We own a company called Cancer Research Technology (CRT), which helps to take forward our scientists’ discoveries and turn them into new treatments for patients. CRT makes sure we receive a share of any profits from our breakthroughs, and that this is ploughed straight back into our life-saving research.
Developing a new drug can take around 10 years and cost more than £1 billion. But all of this work and investment is meaningless if patients can’t get access to new treatments. We’re pushing the Government to make sure that every patient in the UK gets the best cancer treatments, including drugs that are appropriate for them.
How we’ve made a difference so far
Here are just a few examples of how we...
- Have taken around 120 new cancer drugs into early-stage clinical trials, including pemetrexed (Alimta), abiraterone (Zytiga) and temozolomide (Temodal).
- Carried out vital lab research laying the foundations for today’s targeted therapies, including trastuzumab (Herceptin), imatinib (Glivec), vemurafenib (Zelboraf), vismodegib (Erivedge) and more.
- Played a vital role in the early discovery and development of lifesaving drugs such as cisplatin and carboplatin, as well as the first hormone therapies.
