Rare Cancers Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Friday 16th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak after my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso. I declare an interest as an officer of the APPG on Less Survivable Cancers; that term is more or less interchangeable with “rare cancers”, as used in relation to this Bill. I want to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful young people who work for the Less Survivable Cancers Taskforce, which stands behind the APPG and brings together so many of the charities—such as Pancreatic Cancer UK, which has been mentioned, as well as brain tumour charities, cancer charities and so on—that work to try to achieve something on this front.

Although we have waited, as my noble friend Lady Browning said, a long time for this Second Reading, the timing is quite apposite, because this is Less Survivable Cancers Awareness Week, and we are contributing to that as much as anything else.

I also want to declare that, like other noble Lords, I am a survivor until now of a less survivable cancer, having been diagnosed with a terminal oesophageal cancer two and a half years ago, which, remarkably, has been in complete metabolic remission for most of the last two years.

I want to congratulate, of course, Dr Scott Arthur and the noble Baroness, Lady Elliott of Whitburn Bay, on introducing the Bill. I want to make only two points. First, I want to depart slightly from the noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso, in raising a tone of criticism, or a word of criticism, of what we might call big pharma. In my case, the immunotherapy drug that was probably crucial in achieving my recovery was developed for breast cancer. Breast cancer is, of course, a cancer which is profitable for pharmaceutical companies, so they have developed some wonderful drugs. My cancer is part of a group of cancers that have come under the heading of GNI cancers. GNI cancer oncologists have adapted this drug and used it to treat oesophageal cancer and other cancers of that sort. So we must be careful of shunning the big pharmaceutical companies. They are the source of much of the innovation, and we are seeing a staggering pace of innovation—that was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn. It is up to us to work with them and to get the best out of them as far as we can.

Secondly, it is easy to think that these cancers have suffered from a sort of casual neglect, that we just have not bothered with them or put enough money into them. In fact, they present acute difficulties of their own as far as research is concerned. One of them is conducting trials. The fact is that people diagnosed with one of the less survivable cancers tend to die very quickly. Many of them have very short survival periods, and conducting trials with patients who are dying very fast is very difficult. It is very difficult to construct a trial which gives you the results that you want. I have great hope in the national lead for rare cancers being appointed. The right person can make a real difference in pulling things together so that we can get some trials going for these cancers that could produce statistically valuable results.

The other thing we should be doing is ensuring that the transition from diagnosis to treatment is rapid. That does not require research; it is in our hands already, because it is, in essence, an organisational matter.

If you are presented suddenly with a cancer diagnosis, and it is usually a sudden event, and you are told you are facing death in a year or so—a short period ahead—you want to know that the Government and the state are on your side. This Bill is a good example of government showing that it is on the side of people facing very difficult circumstances.