Drugs hope for blood cancer sufferers as hospital joins trials network

St James’s Hospital in Leeds will be among 13 centres in the country to join a clinical trials network with access to drugs worth up to £50m in an initiative by the charity Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research to improve poor survival rates for some types of leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma.

A research nurse and an analyst will work from the hospital to recruit patients who are not responding to current treatments. They will also deal with time-consuming paperwork linked with setting up clinical trials for promising new drugs.

More than 12,000 people in the UK die from blood cancers each year – more than deaths from breast or prostate cancer – and survival rates have improved very little for most of the last decade.

The charity’s clinical trials co-ordinator, Prof Peter Hillmen, consultant haematologist at Leeds, said: “Being part of this clinical trials network will increase the access of blood cancer patients in Leeds to life-saving drugs and treatments. It offers hope to those patients who do not respond to current treatments.”

Improvements in treating some blood cancers have been slow as pharmaceutical companies have often seen it as uneconomic to develop new drugs. Trials have also been difficult to set up because of problems recruiting enough patients with rare conditions.

The network means patients will be able to take part in a trial in Leeds rather than travelling to another part of the country.

Specialist Prof Charlie Craddock, of Birmingham University which will be the network’s hub, said: “Every doctor will tell you that they are routinely turning down promising new drugs because they don’t have the resources to conduct early stage clinical trials.

“We have a moral case for getting new drugs out there as soon as possible – if you have a relative with a blood cancer, you don’t want life-saving treatment available in 10 years, you want it now.”