News digest – lung stats, political action, PARP inhibitors and more

• We released new stats showing that around 1,800 patients with lung cancer are missing out on surgery each year, because of local variations in care.
• This needs political action to fix – something we’re highlighting in our Cross Cancer Out campaign.
• In other healthcare policy news, the head of the NHS unveiled a new five-year plan for our health service, but highlighted the need for further government investment, according to the BBC.
• A drug we helped develop edged closer to getting a European license. Olaparib – a type of drug known as a PARP inhibitor – has shown promise in treating women whose ovarian cancer is caused by a faulty BRCA gene. We blogged about the announcement; here’s Reuters’ take.
• We announced a new funding scheme to develop so-called ‘biotherapeutics’ – cancer drugs made from biological molecules rather than synthetic chemicals. Read more in this blog post.
• Cancer Research UK researchers at University College London made a compelling discovery about how lymph nodes swell during infection – something that sheds new light on how the immune system works. Our blog post has some amazing images – read it here.
• The BBC reported on the announcement of a new £110m ‘Precision Cancer Medicine Institute’ in Oxford.
• US researchers announced promising early results for a new experimental cancer drug, which can shrink lung tumours in mice.  The Mirror covered the story.
• It’s not a breakthrough (sorry STV), but it is really interesting – researchers in Dundee (part-funded by Cancer Research UK) discover another piece in the elaborate jigsaw puzzle of how DNA is replicated when cells multiply.
• “The war on cancer is stalling” because pharmaceutical companies only make drugs for profit, according to comments by a UK researcher published in the Daily Mail.
• Researchers in the US, working on a huge collaborative project to map cancer’s DNA, have discovered much more detail about the genes that go wrong in thyroid cancer. Medscape covered the finding.
• The Guardian took a look at the state of play with regards lung cancer screening
• A new study found that non-smokers who live with smokers are exposed to three times the officially recommended safe levels of damaging air particles, according to the BBC.
• And the Beeb also covered this intriguing story about the role of the ‘Y’ chromosome in men with cancer.
• We looked back at the recent party conference season, including Labour’s pledge on early cancer diagnosis.
• The Medical Research Council announced a £230m investment to UK science, including new state-of-the-art radiotherapy equipment for the Institute of Cancer Research.
• This fascinating article in Nature News looked at how cancer cells can shed tiny particles of a molecule called RNA, that can affect their neighbours.

And finally

• A small study involving mice fed different diets and exposed to UV rays led to alarmist and incorrect headlines such as “Sunlight is key to diabetes fight”. This is unhelpful, dangerous and inaccurate. We looked at the research in this blog post.