Personal cancer 
therapies 
pioneered 
in trial

The newly formed London Lung Cancer Alliance hopes to enrol every sufferer across London, as well as some other parts of the country, in trials in a bid to improve care through more personalised medicine.

The news comes after figures showed a bleak outlook for lung cancer survival. Only 27.2 per cent of men and 30.5 per cent of women survive for one year after diagnosis, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Lung cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in the UK after breast cancer, with around 42,000 new cases each year.

The Alliance hopes that 3,000 people diagnosed in the capital each year will benefit from personalised therapies during the trials. Researchers will genetically profile tumours and test a series of “targeted therapies”.

Professor Alan Ashworth, chairman of the London Lung Cancer Alliance and chief executive of The Institute of Cancer Research, said: “For far too long the prospects for patients with lung cancer have been bleak. But now we have an opportunity to change that as new genetic techniques for studying tumours open up the prospect of trialling novel targeted therapies for lung cancer.

“The London Lung Cancer Alliance has brought together leading organisations across London with the aim of applying state-of-the-art technology to radically shake up the way we treat lung cancer. We believe that this new alliance will genuinely improve the prospects for lung cancer patients.”

Professor Stephen Spiro, deputy chair of the British Lung Foundation, added: “It is a very sad state of affairs that survival rates for lung cancer currently lag so far behind rates for other common forms of cancer. Just last week, new statistics revealed that only seven per cent of people with lung cancer are still alive five years after diagnosis, compared to over 80 per cent for cancers such as breast and prostate.

“A significant part of the problem is the shortage of patients involved in clinical trials. Hopefully this new alliance will help address this problem, allowing for the development of new techniques and more targeted therapies for tackling lung cancer.”