Below are some FAQs on cancer and Cancerbackup. Please also see the 'Lifestyle' and 'What is cancer' questions in the Q&As section of the website.

All new treatments for cancer must be checked for safety and efficacy by the licensing authorities. Usually this is done by the EMEA (European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products) for the whole of Europe but may sometimes be carried out by the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) for the UK. These processes usually take between six and 10 months.

Once a treatment is licensed for use in the UK it can be used within the NHS. But some treatments, and nearly all cancer treatments, are then referred by the Department of Health for a further assessment by the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). The referral process has recently been revised and we are waiting to see if the new system will lead to a shorter referral period. Under the old system it could take up to 14 months for a new treatment to be referred to NICE. The new system should cut this to around six months.

Once treatments have been referred, NICE assesses them for clinical and cost effectiveness and produces guidance for use in the NHS. A backlog of 23 cancer drugs had built up under the old system, but the new process can begin before a license has been granted. This means that in the future guidance could be published a matter of weeks after the license is granted. Health Service Circular 1999/176 states that any treatments which are not referred to NICE, or those awaiting a decision by NICE, may still be prescribed within the NHS but increasingly commissioners will not fund cancer treatments which are not NICE-approved.

Traditional cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiotherapy affect normal cells as well as cancer cells, resulting in troublesome side effects. Targeted therapy aims to attack cancer cells without damaging normal tissue – leading to fewer side effects. Scientists identify certain features of cancer cells such as the way they divide, grow, repair and communicate with each other. They then develop treatments that ‘target’ those features.

There are several different types of targeted therapy and they all work slightly differently. Some work on receptors within the cell; some affect blood vessels that supply the cancer with oxygen/nutrients and some disrupt the internal environment of the cancer cell causing it die.

Some examples of targeted therapy:

• Monoclonal antibodies
• Biological response modifiers
• Angiogenesis inhibitors
• Signal transduction inhibitors

For the year ending September 2005 approximately £630 million was spent on cancer drugs prescribed in hospitals and in the community. The NHS budget as a whole was approximately £90 billion which makes cancer treatments less than 1% of the total.

Please see the Innovation Fund policy briefing on our campaigns pages.

Cancerbackup provides its services through its website (www.cancerbackup.org.uk) its free helpline (0808 800 1234) a series of information booklets, audio tapes, as well as through its drop-in centres in hospitals across England.

Overall, Cancerbackup supports nearly 70,000 people a year.

A recent pan-European report on patient access to cancer drugs, published by the Karolinska Institute stated that: “the UK ranks as the number one country in the amount of direct cancer research funding, with the charitable sector contributing more than the government in research funding. Yet this report illustrates that the UK lags behind other EU countries in terms of the ability of cancer patients to access new cancer drugs.”