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According to the World Health Organisation, cancer is the second leading cause of mortality worldwide, with roughly 9.6 million deaths due to one or more forms of the disease. In your opinion, how would you describe the current state of cancer drug discovery?

In the last few decades, we have made significant strides, but there is much more we can do: find more targeted treatments with less impactful side effects and address many of the cancers of unmet need, such as brain tumors and liver cancers.

We still do not understand these cancers well, so there must be an increased focus on investing in and collaborating on these areas across the industry – the more we know about these diseases, the better we can target them, and the kinder the treatments will be for patients.

We have seen massive steps taken to accelerate drug discovery. For example, the whole era of functional genomics and the leaps in the application of machine learning to aid disease targeting and wider drug discovery have helped us understand the causes, consequences and potential treatments of various cancers.

What are the major challenges that this cancer research faces?

Public spending and the general cost-of-living represent massive challenges for the charity sector and drug discovery projects funded by donations. When people’s budgets are limited, donating is understandably not always the first priority. In these times, we need to be mindful and try to mitigate the challenge to ensure our science does not suffer.

Another key area we need to improve on is early disease diagnosis. As with anything, early diagnosis provides the best chance for treatment or management. There is so much more we need to do to balance out what opportunities people have for early therapies as well as the range of treatments available to them.

However, this cannot be pursued in isolation. Early diagnosis must also consider and combat the huge inequalities existing globally across both diagnostic and cancer treatments, including those arising from ethnicity and socio-economic deprivation. CRUK and others are investing heavily to address this.