At The Christie, our cancer researchers are making many breakthroughs, thanks to donations from generous supporters of The Christie Charity.

Our doctors are now focusing on a rare cancer – cancer of unknown primary (CUP). This is when cancer has spread from its point of origin in the body, but doctors can’t determine where it started – even after routine tests, such as CT scans and biopsies.

At The Christie, we want to change outcomes for CUP patients. Donate today and you could help improve diagnosis and find better ways to treat CUP.

CUP means limited options for patients

A cancer diagnosis is always hard for patients, but a diagnosis of CUP is particularly difficult to hear. Because doctors don’t know where the cancer started, they can’t offer targeted treatment. Some CUP patients can have broad-acting chemotherapy, but because it can’t be focused on the site of the primary cancer, the results are less effective.

Although CUP makes up only 2% of all new cancer diagnoses, it’s the 6th most common cause of death from cancer. This is because a lack of treatment options and late diagnosis means CUP patients often only have weeks or months left to spend with loved ones. And every day, around 26 people sadly die from CUP.

Despite these shocking figures, CUP receives little research funding. But we want to change outcomes for CUP patients in the future.

A donation from you today could help our researchers improve CUP diagnosis. With your help, our experts want to give more CUP patients more time with their loved-ones.

How your donation will help CUP patients

By giving to The Christie Charity’s CUP appeal, you could help our researchers improve diagnosis. They want to use the DNA from cancer cells in patient’s blood and tissues to work out where the cancer started from.

For most cancers, doctors can use patients’ symptoms and standard blood and tissue tests to make a diagnosis. But for CUP patients, this doesn’t give enough detail. DNA carries genetic information. By investigating a patient’s DNA in a blood test, doctors can better understand CUP tumours.

And your donation could also help our researchers find better ways to treat CUP. If doctors know where cancer started in the body, it can open up a greater range of treatment options, including targeted treatments, immunotherapy and clinical trials.

These initial clinical trials are already helping CUP patients, like Lee Young. After being diagnosed with CUP, Lee started on a targeted clinical trial at The Christie. Lee responded incredibly well to the trial – so well that he took on the Manchester Half Marathon for The Christie Charity. Read Lee’s story to find out more about his CUP trial.

With our doctors’ research into CUP, more CUP patients will be able to access genetic testing. And if that testing proves beneficial, it could eventually lead to changes to NHS guidelines about how patients can be treated.

Our hope is that that one day, DNA testing could become standard for CUP patients, who could then benefit from personalised treatment. And you could make this hope a reality by giving today to our CUP research appeal. By donating today, you could help improve treatment outcomes for the next generation of CUP patients.

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Last updated: March 2024

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