I thank the hon. Lady, and I completely concur. I can foresee great benefits for those in the outer reaches of the NHS who do not necessarily come across information about many of the trials that are taking place. One of the biggest criticisms of the original formulation of my Bill was the fear in connection with getting people on to clinical trials. I would like to think that we have not just overcome that issue, with the amendments we are discussing and the latest version of the Bill, but have gone some way along the line to help improve the ability of registered medical practitioners to have knowledge of such trials. I completely concur with the hon. Lady’s point. We have innovation everywhere, so there is a real purpose behind having a database, regardless of whether the Minister has had the ability to set one up before now.
On research, Lord Winston made a very important point particularly well in the other place on Second Reading of the Mesothelioma Bill. He stated:
“There is no question that in the field of treatment there is a great deal of research.”
He had a list of a number of chemotherapeutic agents that were being looked at, saying:
“In recent years I can count at least 10 or 11”.
He then went on to name them. They are impossible for me to pronounce, so I will not do so here today. He said that,
“there are various combinations of those therapies with other well-known mitotoxic agents. These have included trials”.
He went on to say:
“Other treatments have been researched: of course there is surgery…and there are now attempts to try to reduce the tumour inside the lung membranes.”
He spoke about three trials that Cancer Research UK is conducting to emphasise the wide range of “stuff”, as he put it, that is going on.
“One is some work with HSV1716, which is a virus that acts against dividing cancer cells. It comes from the herpes virus…a very good example of where we might make a breakthrough in treatment. Then there is a different strand of research with ADI-PEG 20, which in combination with other drugs such as cisplatin affects a particular amino acid in the chain of cell division”—
which could prevent cancer cells from multiplying.
“That has been specifically targeted for the treatment of mesothelioma. A compound, GSK3052230, developed by GSK, is I think about to enter phase 3 trials very shortly. That attacks the FGFR1 gene, and therefore stops cancer cells growing.”
This is where he makes the point exactly:
“There is now an increasing emphasis on understanding that, if we are going to improve outcomes for patients with a variety of different cancers, and other chronic long-term conditions, we need to move away from a generalised approach to managing disease towards personalised, precision medicine”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 November 2015; Vol. 767, c. 395-7.]
Medicine is going to change. Research is going to change. Spreading the information about that across our NHS, and how quickly we can do that and learn from success and failure in our NHS, is a very, very important matter.