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Where your money goes
You are helping to fund life-saving research.
Every two minutes, someone in the UK is diagnosed with cancer. Your support, through events like the Race for Life, is what helps us continue our ground-breaking work to see more people surviving cancer.
Cancer Research UK are world leaders in finding new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer. We receive no government funding for our research; we rely on the funds raised by fantastic people like you.
Help us to create more tomorrows for more people.
How your money helps us beat cancer
£5 kits out one of our ground-breaking research labs with essential chemicals - the bread and butter of day-to-day experiments, helping to beat cancer sooner.
£20 buys a new bulb for our microscopes, illuminating minute details of cancer cells.
£100 buys a Bunsen burner - a simple item that helps our scientists ignite our ground-breaking research on a daily basis.
£400 is the cost of running Cancer Chat for one day, helping thousands of people through very difficult times.
£12 buys a lab timer to keep our scientists on track as they go about their work, finding out what makes a cancer cell tick.
£50 buys special restriction enzymes that work like molecular scissors to cut up the long strands of DNA in our cells.
£200 helps fund a postdoc researcher - developing their skills in the lab under the supervision of expert scientists.
£1,000 helps fund Dr Gerhardt Attard and his team as they research how prostate cancer develops resistant to treatments for one day.
How we decide what research to fund
There are over 200 types of cancer for us to beat. When researchers come to Cancer Research UK with their ideas, we need to decide which projects need our support. Watch this video to see how we ensure the money you raise funds the science that stands the best chance of making a difference.
Danielle's story
Danielle was 29 years old when she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in August 2018. Living with her partner, Tim, and their young daughter, Danielle had always been fit and healthy, until she noticed a small lump in one of her breasts and decided to get it checked out by her GP.
“My little girl was only six months old and I was breast feeding, so the GP told me that the lump was likely to do with hormonal changes in my body and that there was probably nothing to worry about.”
When the lump didn’t go away, Danielle went to visit her GP again, and was referred to her local hospital for tests.
She was then dealt the devastating blow that not only did she have breast cancer, but that her cancer was stage 4, had spread to her liver, and was now incurable.
“I just went into complete shock, I couldn’t take in a word of what the doctor was saying. It was like a bad dream”, she said.
Given how advanced Danielle’s cancer was, her oncologist decided to try a pioneering treatment, including chemotherapy and a number of targeted drugs. Once her treatment had started, Danielle immediately felt a change in her tumour.“It had definitely shrunk… so when I went back for my next cycle I asked them to do a scan to see what was going on.
“I’d only had one round of chemo at that point and wasn’t due a scan for the next couple of weeks, but the oncologist felt my lump and was so amazed that she sent me for an ultrasound straight away.”
To her delight and amazement, the scan revealed that Danielle’s tumour had shrunk by nearly fifty percent.“I was over the moon and for the first time in weeks I could see light at the end of a very dark tunnel”, she said.
Since then, Danielle has gone from strength to strength, and doctors are deciding if she will need follow up radiotherapy, as her latest scans have shown no visible signs of cancer in the breast, but they are still showing a small amount of cancer in the liver.
Danielle is now happily making plans for the future. She and Tim are getting married in June, and she is also planning on taking part in the Hastings Race for Life 10k event in the same month.
“If I had got this diagnosis 10 years ago, or even maybe five, this really would’ve been a death sentence. But with the amazing progress being made by organisations such as Cancer Research UK I have a fighting chance of a normal, long and happy life and that’s what I intend to have.”
Emma's story
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, Emma agreed to take part in a new trial of 2 antibody treatments along with high dose chemotherapy treatment. “I just wanted to throw everything I could at this cancer… I felt I wanted to be part of something that could benefit future generations.”
Emma has since received the amazing news that she is clear of cancer. Today she continues to help fund research similar to what she went through.
The latest in cancer research
You can keep up to date on how the money you raise makes a difference. Check out our Science News page to see some highlights of exactly what research is being done and the changes being made to ensure we see 3 in 4 people surviving cancer by 2034.