Advanced Brain Cancer: Tissue Freezing

Jonathan Brash Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I start by saying how honoured I am to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who demonstrates so ably that the high-minded ideals of representation, compassion and decency run right through this place, and perhaps more often than is fully recognised. I thank him for his contribution.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Chris Evans) for securing this important debate, and his constituent Ellie for her campaigning—I can say without hesitation that you have another signed-up supporter of Owain’s law here today in me. As my hon. Friend demonstrated, MPs do not generally come to these debates to have abstract policy discussions, but to do our most important job: to be the voice of our constituents.

That is where I want to start. I want to share the experience of my constituent, Samantha Jones, who came to see me alongside her father-in-law, Garry Jones, following the death of her husband, Trevor, from glioblastoma. Trevor was just 41 years old when he suddenly became ill on Christmas Day 2024. Until that moment, there had been no warning signs and no symptoms that anyone could reasonably have recognised. Tests revealed stage 4 glioblastoma, and he was given six months to live. He lived for nine months and died in September 2025.

Like so many families confronted with this diagnosis, they were plunged into a world of shock, fear and urgent decision making. A biopsy was taken, which confirmed and sequenced the cancer, and at that point the family believed that everything possible was being done. It was only later, through Samantha’s own research and through conversations with an oncologist experienced in international practice, that they learned something that they found deeply troubling. There were treatments that may have been available to Trevor on the basis of his biopsy, but they could not be used because the tissue sample had not been flash frozen. Instead, the biopsy had been stored in paraffin blocks, which is standard practice in much of the UK, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly. By the time the family discovered the significance of that, it was too late: Trevor was too ill to undergo another biopsy, too unwell to travel and unable to take part in clinical trials.

Samantha told me that in Germany brain tumour biopsies are flash frozen as a matter of course. That allows for far more advanced genomic and molecular testing, which can open the door to a wider range of treatments. In the UK, by contrast, flash freezing is done only if it is specifically requested, or if the patient is part of a clinical trial. For families who have just been told that their loved one has an aggressive and terminal brain cancer, that is not a realistic expectation. They are in shock. They are terrified. They are placing their trust in the system to do everything that it can, without knowing that one unmade request could close off future options entirely.

That raises a simple but profound question, which I put to the Minister: why does the NHS not routinely flash freeze all brain tumour biopsies as standard practice? What can we do to change that here and now? I am not suggesting false hope. I fully recognise that glioblastoma remains a devastating diagnosis with limited treatment options, but when options are already so few, it cannot be right that patients are denied even the possibility of certain treatments because of how their tissue samples were stored.

This is also an issue of fairness and equality. Access to the best possible diagnostics and research pathways should not depend on geography, chance or whether a family happen to know the right question to ask at the worst moment in their lives. Samantha and Garry came to see me not only in grief but with a determination—one reflected by Ellie, in the Public Gallery this morning—that something good might come from their devastating experience. They want other families to be spared the same sense of missed opportunity and unanswered questions.

More broadly, brain cancers remain under-recognised and underfunded compared with other forms of cancer, despite their severity and poor outcomes. If we are serious about improving survival, treatment and research, we must be willing to look honestly at current practice and ask whether it is good enough, because I think the consensus is that it is not.

I hope that the Minister will engage constructively on this issue and consider making the flash freezing of brain tumour biopsies standard practice across the NHS, because that could improve patient access to treatment, strengthen research and offer families reassurance that everything possible is being done. For Trevor, such a change has come too late, but for future patients it does not have to.