What steps it is taking to ensure that patients with less survivable cancers are able to access clinical trials.

The Scottish Government invests around £40 million annually in the NHS through NHS Research Scotland to meet the additional costs of hosting research, including clinical trials. Of this around £10 million per annum supports the cost of cancer research (including research into rare tumours) carried out in the NHS. This figure is not routinely broken down into tumour type.
This infrastructure investment includes the NRS Cancer Research Network. The role of the network is to support the recruitment of patients into clinical research across all cancer types, including less survivable cancers.
The Scottish Government is a funding partner, along with the other devolved nations and Cancer Research UK, in the Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre Network (ECMC). The ECMC Network comprises 18 centres across the UK (including in Edinburgh and Glasgow), both adult and paediatric, that support pioneering early stage clinical trials and translation of scientific discoveries into new treatments for patients, including those with less survivable cancers.
As part of the Precision Medicine Ecosystem investment announced by the First Minister in February 2016, funding of £700,000 has been committed to “Precision Panc”, a research project that uses state of the art techniques to better characterise Pancreatic Cancer, allowing patients to be recruited to clinical trials efficiently and quickly. In March 2017 Cancer Research UK announced an investment of £10 million to support Precision Panc. This investment will allow the molecular profiling of patients’ tumours (to be carried out at the University of Glasgow). The researchers will use the molecular profile of each individual cancer to offer patients and their doctor a menu of trials that might benefit them. Three clinical trials planned as part of this initiative will recruit a total of 658 patients in 20 UK centres – with the scope to add more trials in the future.