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ABOUT US

Our mission

Uniting the world’s brightest minds against cancer’s toughest challenges

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The power of discovery

As a society, we’ve made incredible progress against cancer. But tough challenges continue to stand in our way. These are big challenges – elusive, ambitious, just out of reach.

But with the world’s brightest minds coming together and thinking differently, they’ll become solvable. Through Cancer Grand Challenges, a diverse, global community is supported to come together, think differently and take these challenges on. 

Founded by:

CRUK
NCI

Breaking traditional boundaries

Cancer Grand Challenges supports a global community of diverse, world-class research teams to come together, think differently and take on some of cancer’s toughest challenges.

These are the obstacles that continue to impede progress and no one scientist, institution or country will be able to solve them alone. With a series of $25m awards, Cancer Grand Challenges teams are empowered to rise above the traditional boundaries of geography and discipline to ultimately change outcomes for people with cancer.

Founded by the two largest funders of cancer research in the world – Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the US – and uniting an international community of partners, Cancer Grand Challenges aims to make the progress against cancer we urgently need. 

$400m
invested to date

Building a global community

To drive a step change in cancer research, we need to be ambitious. The challenges blocking our progress demand global team science and funding on an unprecedented scale: we need to rethink our approach and usher in a new era of discovery.

With collective support from global funders, partners and philanthropists who share our aspirations, we have the power to create change. Together we can galvanise the world’s scientific community – freeing them from constraints to drive progress against cancer’s toughest challenges.

We’ve witnessed great progress. But complex challenges still stand. It’s time to come together, think differently and create change.