Mr Richard 'Dick' Clemons

Our vision is to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured. In the 1970s, less than a quarter of people with cancer survived. But over the last 40 years, survival has doubled – today half will survive. Our ambition is to accelerate progress and see three-quarters of people surviving the disease within the next 20 years.Our strategy will give us the foundations we need to tackle the challenges ahead.

We’re focusing our efforts in four key areas – working to help prevent cancer, diagnose it earlier, develop new treatments and optimise current treatments by personalising them and making them even more effective.We’ll continue to support research into all types of cancer and across all age groups. And we’re keeping our focus on understanding the biology of cancer so we can use this vital knowledge to save more lives. We’re increasing our research in key areas such as early diagnosis, and hard-to-treat cancers including lung, pancreatic, oesophageal cancers and brain tumours. We’re developing new tests, surgery and radiotherapy techniques, and cancer drugs. We want to personalise prevention, screening and treatment and bring benefits to patients sooner.

To help accelerate progress, we’ll be investing an additional £50 million a year into new funding schemes for our researchers. These will encourage collaboration and innovation, and support research tackling some of the biggest scientific challenges in cancer research. 

But we can’t achieve our mission alone. We rely on our dedicated scientists, doctors and nurses, and the generosity of our supporters across the UK. With your help, we can beat cancer sooner.