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 Britain, Europe, North America and Asia, including three Nobel laureates, say advances in artificial intelligence and other technologies have created a ‘unique opportunity’ to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer in the next decade.
In a ‘Letter to the World’, the researchers called cancer a “defining health problem of our time” and argued that it deserves the same “massive global response” that mobilized during the Covid pandemic to produce tests and vaccines. and treatments for the virus.
“As leading representatives of the global scientific and research community, we know we are at an inflection point that could change the way we understand and conquer cancer,” they wrote. With philanthropic support, the researchers said, the field could translate ideas in the laboratory into clinical tools much more quickly, improving or saving millions of lives.
Worldwide, 18 million people are diagnosed with cancer every year and 10 million die from the disease. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the number of cases is expected to increase by 50% by 2040. Recently, scientists have noticed a sharp increase in cases among those under 50.
Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute in London and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Medicine, said technological leaps mean cancer research can now be carried out much faster. In the coming decade, he said, childhood cancer therapies could undergo a “revolution,” while tests and personal data should enable earlier detection of tumors and more personalized treatments.
But according to Cancer Research UK, scientists in the field are facing one £1 billion funding gap which threatens to jeopardize progress over the next decade. “If we want to continue making leaps and bounds in the way we prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, we need the money,” said Nurse, a signatory of 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 the UK’s cancer death rates were reduced by 15% over that time.
Britain has one of the worst five-year survival rates among rich countries for breast, lung and bowel cancer, three of the most common forms of the disease. The poor performance is largely caused 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 starting treatment within 62 days of suspecting 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 at their early stages, while AI is increasingly being used to identify patients most at risk for specific cancers.
Another signatory of the letter, Prof. Sir Peter Ratcliffe, the 2019 Nobel Prize winner in medicine and professor 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 transform the way we think about cancer and the design of cancer therapies,” he said.
CRUK said philanthropic donations raised by its campaign would support the work at the Crick and the world Major challenges for cancer research initiative.
Professor Caroline Dive, interim director of the CRUK Manchester Institute, said: “We are at a truly pivotal time for cancer research. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that we are entering a golden age, in which discoveries of recent decades have allowed us to make real progress.”