Rare Cancers Bill

Lord Mendelsohn Excerpts

Friday 16th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Elliott of Whitburn Bay, and congratulate her on bringing this Bill to the House and enabling all of us in this Chamber to focus on these issues. We have heard from a number of colleagues about their own personal stories and people they know, and of course those we admire. I think today of my dear friend, the former Member for Oldham East, Phil Woolas, who is challenging and fighting for his life against one of these terrible cancers.

I declare my interest as trustee and director of the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation, the UK arm, the US arm and the Israel arm. It is an international charity established to try to find a cure for follicular lymphoma. Because my real declaration of interest is that my wife suffers from this cancer, an incurable but chronically treatable cancer. She, being the dynamic person she is, decided, having been convinced by some brilliant researchers here that we were on the cusp of the potential for curative options, to set up a foundation to do so, which we have done. She was diagnosed in 2016 and started treatment in 2018, curtailed during Covid. She is in remission, but it will come back at some point. I am very pleased to say that a huge amount of progress has been made, and whereas there was only one option for the next line of therapy, there are now a considerable number. The thing I am disappointed about is that most of those are available outside the UK and not in the UK, so if she is to be treated in the most effective way, it cannot currently be in the UK. I hope that will change by the time her condition comes back, because this is the point that I really want to get across about where we are.

The Bill raises the importance of research and focuses on rare cancers. We run by some traditional notions that these things have inherent difficulties and challenges that are not changing with time. They are. In the case of follicular lymphoma, advances that we can make in research and the pursuit of a cure will certainly be contributory factors to helping 32 other cancers that have very significant genetic sharing with the condition that we are focusing on. The use of data and the sort of stuff that used to make these things really difficult are now reasons why the opportunity in science is so large. That is why we can really look to the future as a wonderful moment of opportunity when we can cure some of these cancers, not in most cases by one silver bullet but by a variety of treatments and different modalities. This is why the Bill is so essential, and not just the Bill but the support and commitment from the Government.

We are a great country with great clinical practitioners and researchers: the noble Lords, Lord Kakkar and Lord Darzi, offer a perfect illustration. We have some of the finest. We have great institutions. We have a great history behind this. We have scale and we have opportunities not fully tapped with the NHS, but we are falling behind because of things that we are not doing in research, and actually in culture, because of the consequences of the lack of research money, from Brexit and other things, even with philanthropy and capital. It is hard for our charity to apply the money we could in the UK. We apply much more money in other places, including countries that have public policy supporting this, because it is easier to do so, especially in areas of rare cancers. It is so important to make progress on this. As someone who is committed to doing the best we can here, it pains me when we have rounds of funding where we are not giving to the UK what we are to other places, even countries with a smaller population, where data is so important. We use a place such as Israel, which is able to scale what it has in a way that we cannot. We are the country that should be in the lead on this.

Finally, I turn to the point that CAR T-cell therapy is a key therapy for us; it will be a transformational therapy for so many cancers. The problem that we have in this country is that we are reliant on trials and are not using it as a treatment. It is not just about the fact that Charlotte, a patient suffering from cancer whom I know, was told that this will be the next line of therapy but it is no longer available. Even King’s, one of our great institutions, cannot recruit people for it. The real challenge here is that we have to send these samples to another country to get them checked, whereas other countries have labs in the hospital that do these treatments.

If we focus only on doing the best we can do and supporting the research, but not getting it into treatment so that we have the right relationship with pharma and biotech, we will restrict ourselves. This Bill is a start, and we have to support it.