Bowel Cancer: Research
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on funding bowel cancer research.
Answered by Ashley Dalton
Research is crucial in tackling cancer, which is why the Department invests over £1.6 billion per year in research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). NIHR research expenditure for all cancers was £133 million in 2023/24. Cancer is a major area of NIHR spend, reflecting its high priority.
Over the past five years, the NIHR has committed approximately £52 million across 57 bowel cancer research programmes. These include the FOCUS4 Trials Programme, which recruited over 1,500 patients at centres across the United Kingdom to evaluate how well tumour samples from patients with advanced stage bowel cancer may help select the best treatment for an individual patient, and the Translational Proteomic study, which uses primary tumour samples derived from patients, combined with the application of emerging technology, to understand the mechanisms of drug resistance in cancer cells to help better target anticancer drugs. Additionally, over this period the NIHR supported over 245 commercial and non-commercial clinical research studies into bowel cancer through the NIHR Research Delivery Network, allowing another 30,729 people to participate in potentially life-changing research in the National Health Service.
The NIHR continues to encourage and welcome funding applications for research into any aspect of human health, including bowel cancer.
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