Today we are welcoming a significant Government investment to help find a cure for brain tumours. More than £13 million is being made available and, early next year, further announcements will be made for funding into trials for brain tumour patients.
We are proud to be a partner in a new National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Brain Tumour Research Consortium, alongside other charities, dozens of hospitals, universities, cancer centres and patients. The landmark announcement will see a coordinated UK-wide effort to transform outcomes for people living with brain tumours and their families.
This is the culmination of a decade of campaigning work by our community to increase funding by Government into research. Your support and experiences have helped us unlock this significant sum. We could not have done it without you.
Ten years ago, alongside the Realf family as they marked the first anniversary of the death of their son Stephen, we launched a petition to call for increased research funding for brain tumours. It was a significant step forward when in 2018 the Government announced that £40 million was being made available via the NIHR. However, as we and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Brain Tumours (APPGBT) were to later unravel, money being ‘available for allocation’ and money actually being deployed to researchers were very different things.
Our 2023 landmark report via the APPGBT, Pathway to a Cure, laid bare the fact that research into brain tumours continued to be neglected by Government. Through our secretariat role for the APPGBT we brought NIHR to the table to unpick why the money hadn’t been fully deployed. We have relentlessly pursued this question in our engagement with Parliamentarians, Ministers and the Civil Service in the years since.
We are proud to have worked with you all to be a catalyst for change for the brain tumour community.
Dan Knowles, our CEO, said: “You’ve helped us unlock millions of pounds from Government for research into brain tumours. We’ve been campaigning to hold Government to account so that planned investment didn’t become an empty promise and today we’ve seen the impact of your passion and drive to make a difference. We are proud of our work to ensure your stories of hope and loss have not been ignored by those with the power to make a difference. Our work doesn’t stop here though. We are campaigning to increase the national investment in research into brain tumours to £35 million per year – and Government needs to play a big role in that. Together we will find a cure.”
Professor Juanita Lopez, from the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, will lead the Consortium with Professor Darren Hargrave, of the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, and Brain Tumour Research Scientific and Medical Advisory Board member Dr Richard Mair from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge, as co-leads.
The consortium will address five challenges contributing to the current lack of new and effective therapies:
- Large amounts of variation – there are more than 100 brain cancer types and even patients with the same type can be affected differently
- The limited number of new drugs available for testing
- Insufficient research facilities, research leaders and research staff
- Shortcomings in planning and execution of research studies
- Lack of consistent and dedicated support for brain cancer research
Read more on the NIHR website.
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