Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure NHS professionals are aware of personalised cancer vaccines.

The NHS Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad (CVLP) is a platform set up to accelerate the development of cancer vaccines and speed up access to mRNA personalised cancer vaccine clinical trials for cancer patients. The CVLP has been instrumental in accelerating trial activity in cancer research, with CVLP sites driving faster activation and enrolment timelines.

The CVLP provides an extended network of referral sites to broaden trial access and to identify eligible patients through genetic analysis, working with the Vaccine Innovation Pathway to optimise patient recruitment. This means that patients can be recruited from across parts of the country and means that the United Kingdom was the fastest recruiting country for the first international trial of personalised vaccination after surgery for colorectal cancer.

As the CVLP continues its phased scale-up across the country, professional awareness is being driven by the expansion of participating trial sites and use of the referral network.