Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to increase levels of research into rare and less common cancers.

The Department invests £1 billion per year in health research through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). NIHR expenditure on cancer research has risen from £101 million in 2010/11 to £137 million in 2016/17. This is the largest NIHR spend in a disease area.

The NIHR is funding and supporting a range of research on rare and less common cancers. As with other Government funders of health research, the NIHR does not ring-fence funding for specific disease areas. The level of research spend in a particular area is driven by factors including scientific potential and the number and scale of successful funding applications. We would welcome more high-quality research applications on rare and less common cancers.

The Department works closely with Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council, and others via the National Cancer Research Institute, which is a national strategic partnership of the major United Kingdom funders of cancer research.

The Department is also investing in the 100,000 Genomes Project, which will create a major resource for research. Genomic technologies integrated into healthcare will change how we think about and treat many diseases, particularly cancer, and supports the move from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to treatments and interventions, to more tailored approaches known as ‘personalised medicine’. The Project is now accelerating, with over 72,000 samples and 44,500 sequences returned. All grades and types of gliomas, but also rarer brain tumours such as embryonal tumours, pineal tumours, germ cell tumours and neuronal tumours are included in the project.