Video: Professor Uwe Oelfke, Head of the Joint Department of Physics at the ICR and The Royal Marsden, is helping to make treatments smarter and kinder with sophisticated radiotherapy.

The ICR and The Royal Marsden together run a world-leading programme of clinical trials. We have developed innovative new drugs and led major trials demonstrating the effectiveness of precision radiotherapy.

But there remains an urgent need to develop better treatments for patients. Some cancers remain very hard to treat, as do most cancers once they have begun to spread round the body. And as we get better at treating cancer, more patients are living with the disease long term and often coping with serious side-effects from treatment.

We need more effective personalised therapies for cancer, with less severe side-effects than standard treatments. To do this, we must drive further innovations in the design of clinical trials and take new discoveries into the clinic more quickly and more smartly.

Photo: The Royal Marsden

Our researchers will:

• Carry out innovative clinical trials of smarter, kinder personalised therapies
• Design clinical trials that will help us anticipate cancer evolution and adapt treatments as drug resistance emerges
• Devise novel clinical trials to accelerate the development of innovative combination treatments, such as the use of targeted drugs together with immunotherapy or radiotherapy
• Create new, more effective forms of radiotherapy with fewer side-effects
• Bring advances that we have seen already in adult cancers to children through new paediatric cancer trials
• Develop new precision forms of surgery designed to be more effective and less invasive.

Read the full research strategy [PDF]