Helen Soutar, Legacy Partnership Manager at Cancer Research UK visited sunny Blackpool on Tuesday 11th October 2023 to meet with Dawn Lamb and her team at Barker Booth & Eastwood t/a BBE Law.
Helen reported that Dawn and her team have been fantastic supporters of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) for 5 years now and have helped 52 people write their Wills through the #FreeWillService.
Helen thanked Dawn and the team on behalf of Cancer Research UK for facilitating gifts in these Wills amounting to over £1.334m that is a truly tremendous amount of future funding which will help to create many more research milestones in the future.
CRUKs research milestones mean real people affected by cancer have more moments with their loved ones, every day. Thanks to advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment, more than one million deaths have been avoided in the UK since the mid-1980s. But there wasn’t one big research breakthrough that made the difference for everyone affected by cancer. The story of how one million lives were saved is almost four decades long, and our understanding of cancer has grown, moment by moment, over that time.
These are just a few milestones that made it possible.
1980s – CRUK improved radiotherapy by helping to develop and lead the first clinical trial for intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT).
1988 – CRUKs funding helped doctors work out how to use tamoxifen, which has since been called “the most important drug in the history of medical oncology”.
1994 – CRUKs scientists found a chemical to block the production of testosterone, which is the hormone prostate cancer relies on. And later, developed it into a drug to beat cancer: abiraterone.
2020 – CRUK found an innovative way to detect Barrett’s oesophagus, a condition that can lead to oesophageal cancer, with a capsule sponge, essentially a ‘sponge on a string’.
CRUK are proud to be driving progress and Helen thanked BBE for their help in driving it too.
