It’s been five years since the U.K.’s breakup with the European Union, and the impacts of extra red tape and rising costs have left cancer patients across the U.K. in the lurch as they have been left out of research efforts and investigational new drugs being studied across Europe.
Brexit has “damaged the practical ability” of doctors to offer life-saving new drugs to U.K. patients through the region’s publicly funded National Health Service (NHS), the Guardian revealed from a leaked 54-page report that was complied by experts from Cancer Research U.K., the University of Southampton and research consultant company Hatch, among other organizations.
The cost alone of importing new oncology drugs has soared since the split, even quadrupling in some cases, and with some trials increasing shipping costs tenfold as a result of post-Brexit red tape. Patients, including children, whose treatments have failed or cancer has returned, have been denied drugs that could extend or save their lives, senior doctors told the Guardian.
The added hoops researchers in the U.K. must jump through could cause dangerous delays in standard drug testing, the report reveals. For example, in one case, the U.K. had to spend thousands of extra pounds for an official to certify batches of aspirin for use in a cancer trial, despite the batches having already been checked in Europe. Grant funding is also harder to get due to “additional bureaucracy.”
While U.K. patients are missing out on access to top scientific expertise as universities and trial groups struggle to attract "global talent," European research is also missing out on key U.K. researchers.
“The exclusion of UK researchers from European cancer research activities has had, and will continue to have, negative consequences for the overall European cancer research effort,” the report said.
The three areas of U.K. cancer research that are particularly impacted are the regulatory environment for clinical trials, the mobility of the cancer research workforce and access to research funding and collaboration, according to the report. To prevent further harm from the ripple effects of Brexit on cancer patients, the report recommends the creation of a “mutual recognition agreement” for testing drugs, which would cut costs for researchers heading up cross-border trials.
All in all, the report is a comprehensive analysis of a problem that has so far been well documented and is causing additional concern due to rising cancer rates across the U.K. The uptick has been attributed to population growth and improvements in diagnoses but is particularly notable in the younger, under-50s age group, Cancer Research U.K. reported last year.
Still, the U.K. is already on it with recently announced new regulations meant to reduce red tape for clinical studies and boost the nation’s role in international trials, supporting Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s goal of cutting down the time it takes for trials to dose their first participant by 100 days.
The new framework will take effect in April 2026 and comes after a review of the state of commercial clinical trials in the U.K. that was started after statistics showed a significant drop in patient recruitment. It’s all part of Starmer’s plan to “turbocharge” medical research in the U.K., which includes an investment in a new health data research service to help researchers access NHS data.