New cash injection announced for Cancer Drugs Fund

The government's Cancer Drugs Fund scheme will receive an additional funding boost of 400 million pounds, the prime minister has announced.

David Cameron confirmed that the initiative will now run an extra two years until March 2016, with the total amount committed to the fund set to exceed one billion pounds.

The aim of the move will be to ensure that more patients benefit from the fund, with 34,000 having been helped so far, while also guaranteeing that those currently receiving drugs will continue to get them.

Launched in 2010, the fund helps to pay for cancer drugs that have not been approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and are therefore unavailable within the NHS in England.

Andrew Wilson, chief executive of the Rarer Cancers Foundation, said: "The NHS should be there when you need it the most. Without the Cancer Drugs Fund, NHS access to cancer drugs would go back a generation. With it, progress can continue."

It was also announced that Cancer Research UK and Genomics England have agreed a new partnership to support the ongoing project to make Britain the first country in the world to sequence 100,000 genomes within five years.