Leading cancer experts from around the world are calling on wealthy individuals and philanthropists to dig into their deep pockets to accelerate a new golden age of cancer research.
More than 50 senior scientists from the UK, Europe, North America and Asia, including three Nobel laureates, say advances in artificial intelligence and other technologies have created a “unique opportunity” to improve cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment in the next 10 years transform.
In a “Letter to the world”, the researchers called cancer a “defining health issue of our time” and argued that it deserves the same “massive global response” that was put into effect during the Covid pandemic to develop tests, vaccines and treatments to produce for the virus.
“As leading representatives of the global scientific and research community, we know we are at a tipping point that could change the way we understand and overcome cancer,” they wrote. With philanthropic support, the researchers said, the field could turn ideas in the lab into clinical tools much faster and improve or save millions of lives.
Worldwide, 18 million people are diagnosed with cancer annually and 10 million die from the disease. The number of cases is expected to increase by 50% by 2040, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Recently, scientists have noticed a sharp increase in cases among the under 50s.
Sir Paul Nurse, the director of the Francis Crick Institute in London and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Medicine, said technological leaps meant cancer research could now be carried out much faster. In the next decade, he said, therapies for childhood cancers could be “revolutionised”, while tests and personalized data should enable earlier detection of tumors and more personalized treatments.
But according to Cancer Research UK, scientists in the field are facing a Funding shortfall of £1bn over the next decade that threatens to jeopardize progress. “If we want to continue to make great leaps in how we prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, we need the funds,” said Nurse, a signatory to the letter, which urges philanthropists to donate to the global effort.
The letter coincides with the launch of CRUK’s More Research, Less Cancer campaign which aims to raise £400 million in philanthropic funding. The charity estimates that 110,000 deaths could be avoided over the next 20 years if UK cancer death rates were reduced by 15% in that time.
Britain has some of the worst five-year survival rates among rich countries for breast, lung and colon cancer, three of the most common forms of the disease. The poor performance is largely driven by late diagnoses and delays in treatment. In England, waiting times for cancer patients were the worst on record last year, with less than two-thirds start treatment within 62 days of suspected cancer.
Researchers hope that survival rates will improve as a range of new technologies prove themselves. Next generation blood tests can detect more than a dozen cancers earlywhile AI is increasingly being used to flag patients most at risk of specific cancers.
Another signatory to the letter, Prof Sir Peter Ratcliffe, the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine who holds posts at the Crick and the University of Oxford, said new computing tools show enormous potential. “When combined with new analytical methods that work at the molecular level, there is the potential to change the way we think about cancer and the design of cancer therapy,” he said.
CRUK said philanthropic donations raised through its campaign will support work at the Crick and the world Cancer Grand Challenges research initiative.
Prof Caroline Dive, Interim Director at the CRUK Manchester Institute, said: “We are at a very pivotal time for cancer research. I don’t think it is any exaggeration to say that we are moving into a golden age, where discoveries of the last few decades have set us up to make real progress.”
