A LEADING expert in childhood cancer at the University of Nottingham is spearheading a Europe-wide lobby of the European Parliament to try to make it easier for doctors to develop and test new treatments on children and young people with rare cancers.
Every year, around 1,500 children are diagnosed with cancer in the UK, and about 15,000 across the European Union. Most are brain tumours or bone cancers but every childhood cancer is a rare cancer, which makes them especially difficult to treat. Although treatment has improved greatly, about 25 per cent of children with cancer will die.
Professor David Walker, of the university's Children's Brain Tumour Research Centre, has campaigned for public awareness of brain tumour symptoms and better research funding for brain cancer. He has been working closely with two East Midlands MEPs to lobby for changes to planned clinical trials regulations.
Professor Walker said: "At the moment, the existing EU Clinical Trials Directive is a 'one-size-fits-all' piece of EU legislation, making some academic research particularly difficult.
"EU countries are still using different standards for clinical trials depending on their interpretation of the law, and this lack of homogeneity makes it very difficult to set up cross-border clinical trials in children with rare cancers which are large enough to be effective in new treatments."
