Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to support delivery of (a) blood and (b) other cancer clinical trials.

£1.5 billion per year is invested by the Department of Health and Social Care on health research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).The NIHR research expenditure for all cancers was over £121.8 million for 2022/23, with more spent on cancer than any other disease group. Over £20 million of this was spent on Leukaemia research specifically.

In 2022/23 alone, the NIHR Cancer Research Network supported over 950 cancer research studies involving over 90,000 participants. Further investments in 10 Biomedical Research Centres and a network of Experimental Cancer Medicine Centres are supporting the discovery, development, and testing of new cancer treatments, including through hospital-based clinical trials, across the country.

The NIHR continues to encourage and welcome applications for research into any aspect of human health, including blood and all other cancers. Applications are subject to peer review and judged in open competition, with awards made on the basis of the importance of the topic to patients and health and care services, value for money, and scientific quality, rather than against specific disease funding allocations. We would welcome more applications from researchers working on cancer prevention, treatment, and care.