Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many and what proportion of clinical trials have been available for brain tumour patients each year since 2020; and whether he has made an estimate of the number of brain tumour patients that have been able to undergo trials during this same period.

The Department-funded National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network (CRN) supports patients, the public and health and care organisations across England to participate in high-quality research. The following table shows the number of brain tumour studies on the NIHR CRN Portfolio in each year since 2020 in England:

Source: NIHR

Note: this includes observational studies and interventional studies, including clinical trials

We are not aware that brain tumour patients are routinely being excluded from other types of studies, however, we know that sometimes people are automatically excluded from taking part and this can be for good reasons. When designing research studies, researchers consider inclusion and exclusion criteria carefully to ensure they are not unnecessarily excluding specific groups who would benefit from the outcome of their study. However, we are aware that inclusion/exclusion criteria can disproportionally exclude individuals from specific groups for example older adults or pregnant women. The Health Research Authority (HRA) is developing guidance to improve practices in this area. The improved guidance produced by the HRA will help researchers to consider if these people and any other groups may be unnecessarily excluded and consider putting measures in place to address this.