Brand new cancer treatments are more than just a wish. Thanks to research, they’re becoming a reality – and are already changing the way we treat some types of cancer.

Will you donate today to help specialists at The Christie discover revolutionary new ways to treat breast cancer?

How immunotherapy can help cancer research

Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that trains your immune system to fight tumours in the same way it fights things like colds and flu. Cancer cells can avoid the immune system, but scientists are discovering new techniques to get round them and strengthen the immune response.

Now, our experts are planning new clinical trials to make the immunotherapy work even harder. The trials use NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) with immunotherapy and can improve outcomes for breast, lung, and renal cancer patients.

On the trials, patients will take common NSAIDs alongside their standard treatment. Previous research shows that inflammation within cancer tumours can help them to grow and spread, and anti-inflammatory drugs can help make immunotherapy work harder.

One benefit of a trial using NSAIDs is that they are well-known, regulated drugs. This could make treatment cheaper and therefore more accessible for cancer patients.

Now our scientists are hoping to look at this more fully. They’ll work with patients at The Christie and other cancer centres across the UK. With your support, it could help to provide better treatment options and lead to improved outcomes for cancer patients in the long-term.

This is the kind of progress that means our Christmas wish can be achieved. Our understanding of how cancer works, and how it can be treated, is growing with every day of research – and incredible Christie supporters like you help make this possible.

Help grant our wish to find newer, better treatments for cancer. By donating today, you could help our researchers develop better outcomes for patients.

How we want to improve breast cancer treatment

Immunotherapy trials could also improve treatment options for some people with a rarer type of breast cancer, triple negative breast cancer.

Patients with triple negative breast cancer have limited treatment options. Triple negative breast cancer does not have any of the receptors commonly found in other types of breast cancer and is more likely to affect younger people.

Our experts are now hoping that immunotherapy could help these patients. Some of our scientists recently took part in an immunotherapy trial that showed if they treated patients with chemotherapy alongside immunotherapy, it could keep advanced triple negative breast cancer under control for longer.

Trials like this could help Christie patients like Ann. Ann joined an immunotherapy clinical trial at The Christie to treat her cancer when there were no standard treatment options left. Now, she's supporting trials for more patients like her. Read Ann's story to find out how the trial she was on gave her hope back.

We want to double the number of trials we offer at The Christie by 2030 – but we need your help to be able to do this.

The incredible new research centre at The Christie is due to be operational in early 2023. It will be a place for discoveries that lead to better ways to treat cancer, improved survival rates and more time for patients to spend with their loved ones.

Your support is vital to help us to achieve these incredible breakthroughs. It might only take a few minutes for you to donate to our appeal, but in that short space of time you can help turn wishes into reality for so many people with cancer.

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