Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of automatically utilising brain tumour patients’ anonymised data to create relevant datasets for clinical research.

The Department invests over £1.6 billion per year in research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Cancer is a major area of NIHR spending at £141.6 million in 2024/25, reflecting its high priority.

We are committed to furthering our investment in brain cancer research and have already taken steps to stimulate scientific progress and build scientific capacity to do research on brain cancer.

In January 2026, the NIHR announced increased investment of over £25 million in the NIHR Brain Tumour Research Consortium. The world-leading consortium aims to transform outcomes for adults and children, and their families, who are living with brain tumours, ultimately reducing lives lost to cancer. As part of the consortium’s work, patients will be enrolled to a ‘Real World’ study tracking their progress in everyday medical settings, before matching them to new clinical trials based on their cancer subtype.

The Government supports the Rare Cancers Private Members Bill. The bill will make it easier for clinical trials on rare cancers such as glioblastoma to take place in England, by ensuring the patient population can be more easily contacted by researchers.

On 7 April 2025 the Prime Minister announced that the Government and the Wellcome Trust will invest up to £600 million to create a new Health Data Research Service (HDRS). This future HDRS will super-charge research, bringing new treatments and cures to patients, by safely enabling access to patient health data from multiple sources via a single point of access.

The NIHR continues to welcome funding applications for research into any aspect of human health and care, including brain cancer. These applications are subject to peer review and judged in open competition, with awards being made on the basis of the importance of the topic to the public and health and care services, value for money, and scientific quality.