BBC Look East broadcast a special programme live from Addenbrooke’s last night, celebrating the latest innovations in cancer care and research at CUH, and looked ahead to our new East of England cancer hospital, Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital (CCRH).
It highlighted the incredible teams working to deliver breakthroughs in the way we diagnose and treat cancer.
At the heart of the programme were patients and their stories – with an invited audience of people who have either had cancer, are being treated for cancer or living with the disease.
You can watch the programme in full here (opens in a new tab) (until 7pm on Thursday 17th October.)
The half-hour programme featured a number of innovations and ground-breaking research developed at CUH, which is benefiting patients and helping save lives.
- It looked at our Personalised Breast Cancer Programme. The research programme, which decodes the genetic sequence of a patient’s cancer, was pioneered at Addenbrooke’s and is now expanding to Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. It will be the fourth site in the East and the fifth site to open nationally, after being rolled out to Ipswich, Colchester and Oxford. The programme run out of the Precision Breast Cancer Institute, will be moving into the new Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital.
- It also highlighted our advancements in CAR-T cell therapy, a revolutionary immunotherapy which supercharges a patient’s own immune system, training their own cells known as T-cells to fight and destroy the cancer.
- A new state-of-the-art laboratory set to open at Addenbrooke’s which will deliver ‘home-grown’ cells and gene therapies for patients with aggressive cancers and auto-immune conditions. The new lab will help us deliver more treatments to more patients, in readiness for the new Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital on track to be built by 2029.
The planned specialist research hospital for East of England is bringing world-leading research and clinical excellence together, to change the lives of cancer patients across the UK and beyond.
"It will be transformative, not just for the patients and their families in this room tonight, but across the UK. We are designing a hospital which will change the face of how we treat cancer forever - not just regionally, but nationally and internationally."
Prof Richard Gilbertson, Research Lead for the Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital
Following the announcement of an unprecedented funding investment by Cancer Research UK in the CRUK Cambridge Institute, Prof Richard Gilbertson explained how the funding will boost world-class discovery science in Cambridge.
Find out more about the special programme here.