No Deal Brexit will effect new cancer trials that could save children – Medical researchers warn
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Leading medical researchers have warned that their efforts to find new cancer treatments are likely to suffer major setbacks if the UK leaves the EU without a deal.
In particular they fear that researchers based in the UK would face legal restrictions on working with other EU member states on clinical trials carried out across several countries.
Newly established co-operative trials with other EU medical researchers have recently been raising hopes that advances can be made in treating relatively rare cancers. An example is provided by the paediatric hepatic international tumour trial (Phitt), which is seeking to test new techniques to treat children with rare liver cancers, and is part of a larger collaborative international project called the children’s liver tumour European research network (Chiltern).
The €7.9m funding for these projects was supplied through the EU’s Horizon 2020 science funding programme.
“If children are to have a chance of survival from early liver cancer, they often require intense bouts of chemo- otherapy,” he said. “But we do not know exactly how much chemotherapy – which can have very toxic side-effects – to give them. The trouble is that finding the answer is difficult because we have so few patients on whom to test out different regimes.”
