NHS: Cancer Treatments

Lord Deighton Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deighton (Con)]

My Lords, my first experience of the courage of the noble Baroness, Lady Jowell, was watching her take on the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to squeeze the Olympic budget out of him, which was as close as you can get to a combat sport. None of us who knows her is in the least surprised that she should see her cancer challenge as an opportunity to help other people. I thank her for shining her very bright light on this subject and I am delighted to work with her again.

I shall basically talk about science. I believe we are at a pivotal moment in cancer research. That is why for the past year I have been very involved with Cancer Research UK, which has been referred to a few times this afternoon, trying to help it think through how to raise privately all the money needed to capture the enormous opportunity presented by the spectacular advances in science and technology. I shall give noble Lords some examples: the improvements in genomics, the ability to harness our immune system in treatments and our ability to visualise what is going on inside tumours. We can also apply all the new technology we have. When I say things such as “AI”, “deep learning” and “machine learning”, noble Lords all nod and we all know what we are talking about. It means that we can generate and analyse massive amounts of data in a hugely helpful way for big patient trials around the world.

Quite simply, the goal of cancer research, which is what we are thinking about, is to exploit scientific developments—this has been mentioned a couple of times today—to improve 10-year survival outcomes: from two out of four to three out of four people. That is a nice simple goal. To accomplish this, there are three particular areas of focus that I shall bring to noble Lords’ attention. We have talked about the first one already. Cancer Research UK will now devote much more money and meaningfully shift talent and infrastructure to tackle the hard-to-treat cancers such as brain tumours, as well as lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, which killed my father, and oesophageal cancer. As everybody knows, to date, research in these areas, compared with, for example, bowel and breast cancer, has been very low and very thinly spread.

The second key area of work is personalised medicine. Doctors need to be armed with a detailed read-out of the molecular faults in a patient’s tumour, and to be armed with a new generation of drugs that precisely targets them—no more hit-and-miss and wait-and-see. An enormous amount is happening on this all around the world, as was commented on. There are great new treatments and smarter clinical trials. There is a big opportunity to get them properly co-ordinated so that we can get the most out of them; the current approach is much too fragmented.

The final work that I want to talk about is really revolutionary and most captures the changes in science we need to exploit. It is what we are calling the grand challenges. These are very big research grants, aimed simply at solving the biggest problems—the ones that will change people’s lives. They are doing it by bringing together the best scientific talent from around the world and from across different disciplines and forging them together to attack the big problems. I am really optimistic that that will produce world-changing outcomes. Our aim is to raise all the money for this privately, really by conveying to potential donors that, because of the science revolution, the opportunity is huge and it is now, so give us your money. I apologise for practising my pitch here, but we need to work on it.

My request to my noble friend the Minister is not for money but simply to help preserve the competitiveness of the UK’s research environment. I will leave noble Lords with one thought. After we leave the EU, it is essential that our future immigration system allows us to attract, recruit and retain global scientific talent at all professional levels, regardless of nationality. That is my number one ask.

I once again thank the noble Baroness—my dear friend Tessa—for shining her light, and long may it continue.