The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust have successfully renewed our Cancer Research UK Centre and secured very substantial funding.
Our success at renewing the Centre, in what was an extremely competitive funding round, is an endorsement of the world-class quality of our translational research and its potential to deliver real benefits for patients.
An international panel reviewed all the Centre applicants, and was highly impressed by the quality of our past work and our plans for the future.
The ICR and The Royal Marsden were together one of 13 Cancer Research UK Centres to be awarded funding over the next five years – with Cancer Research UK investing a total of £190 million in its network.
Cancer Research UK Centres bring together research teams from higher education institutions and NHS hospitals to focus on translational research – getting cutting-edge discoveries from the laboratory to patients and learning as much as possible from patients to initiate new research ideas and programmes.
The ICR and The Royal Marsden were also successful at renewing our Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (ECMC) – funded through a partnership between Cancer Research UK and the Department of Health.
The ECMC was reviewed at the same time as the Cancer Research UK Centre.
The Cancer Research UK Centre at the ICR and The Royal Marsden will support core infrastructure for translational research and training – including the funding of PhD positions – for non-clinical and clinical scientists.
The ECMC will provide infrastructure support to underpin the translational drug development work at the ICR and The Royal Marsden.
Professor Paul Workman, Chief Executive of the ICR, said: “I am really delighted that the ICR and The Royal Marsden have come through such a competitive funding round to secure renewal of our status as a Cancer Research UK Centre.
"I’m particularly pleased that an international expert panel was so complimentary about what we have achieved here and the ambition of our plans for the future. This funding will play an important role in helping us deliver on the aims we have set out in our new research strategy, which seeks to combat cancer’s complexity, evolution and drug resistance. It will help us deliver real benefits for patients.”