BTOG 2026 | A 2026 update in screening and testing from the UK Lung Cancer Coalition

So the UK Lung Cancer Coalition is a group working with all the organisations in the UK interested in lung cancer, supporting them and our work is really aimed towards improving care of patients with lung cancer, improving services. Our main focus is around lobbying and talking to politicians and NHS policy makers in order to affect these improvements. We work very collaboratively, as I say, with all the organisations in this space, such as the British Thoracic Oncology Group and the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation and others and all the charities and so forth. We have a board of directors chaired by Dr. David Gilligan. We have a clinical advisory group which I lead, made up from all the various groups within lung cancer, so chest physicians, radiologists, oncologists, clinical nurse specialists, surgeons, et cetera. And we also have a number of member groups. And these are generally the charities such as the British Thoracic Oncology Group, EGFR positive, ALK positive, Roy Castle, and so forth, who all input information to us as we synthesize this. And we work over the last 20 years or so since UKLCC was set up by Professor McPeake in 2005, we have written a number of milestone reports. Our most recent one was around genomic testing, trying to improve and speed up genomic testing for patients, as we know it will affect around about 30,000 patients a year with lung cancer who need genomic testing, and at the moment it’s far too slow and too patchy across the UK. I’ve said UK a number of times because one important thing about the UKLCC is we are working across all four UK nations and we’re very keen to develop further work in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We’ve recently done a Scottish Matters pathway report and also most recently a report working with groups in Northern Ireland, helping them develop and drive their pathways and improve services in Northern Ireland. Back in 2015, we set an ambition to try and improve lung cancer survival to 25% by 2025. Between the late 90s and about 2013, 2014, we’d driven it up from about 5% to about 16%. And we set this ambition to try and get the whole community working towards 25 by 25, as we called it. The last hard data, the most recent hard data we have, we know five-year survival is up to about 21%. But some recent modelling by Professor Neil Navani’s group at UCL, whereby what they’ve done is they’ve looked at survival by stage. And we also now know the proportion of patients with lung cancer presenting at each stage. And that is obviously moving from stage four and stage three towards stage two and stage one, particularly with lung cancer screening spreading across England more and more widely. And their modelling suggests that today, the five-year survival from lung cancer in England may be as high as 29%, which is really exciting news. And this really puts us on a par with many other countries across Europe and North America. Now, this is still model data, and it will be a number of years before we actually have confirmation of this. But particularly with the advent of lung cancer screening, I think it shows what can potentially be done. Over the last few years, our main focus has been supporting lung cancer screening, particularly we’ve now got NHS England, the government in England have said they will roll this out across England to 100%. We’re working with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and their administrations to try and get lung cancer screening rolled out. Wales are starting in 2027 but we’d really like to see decisions made for implementation in Scotland and Northern Ireland as well. So CT screening for lung cancer is one of our work streams. We’ve also, as I mentioned, been doing a lot of work on genomic testing and lobbying to improve the speed at which genomic testing is undertaken. This is going to really adversely affect patients unless we can speed things up. And we’ve also done a lot of work on health inequalities and published reports on that. Going forward now, our work plan for 2026 and 2027 is going to focus largely on around survivorship. So as more and more patients are receiving curative treatment for lung cancer, early stage lung cancer, particularly surgery and radical radiotherapy, we are seeing more and more long-term survivors. And also, we are seeing more and more longer-term survivors with novel targeted therapies, even advanced stage patients living for much, much longer than previously. And we’re realizing that as we’ve, in effect, changed the natural history of lung cancer with this large and growing group of survivors which is you know really really pleasing to see it brings new problems and what we’re realizing is that more and more people are at risk of developing second primary lung cancers in fact it may be about as high as one in eight of long-term survivors may be at risk of developing a second primary. So this year, next year, we’re going to do this piece of work around survivorship. We’re also working to support workforce discussions because we’re very conscious that there are shortages in certain areas of the workforce, particularly in radiology, pathology, genomics, clinical nurse specialists. And the third thing we want to do is take our work very much out into the regional areas and into Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. We had a meeting with the Northern Ireland groups recently that Dr. Wendy Anderson organized. We had our 20th anniversary conference at the end of 2025 in London, but in the autumn of this year we’re planning a meeting in Scotland. So those are our main work streams, but our big announcement is back on the success of the 25 by 25, we are setting a new target. What we want to do now is we’ve set a new target of 35 by 35. We want to try and achieve 35% survival five years across all UK nations, not just England, which we’ve achieved with 25 by 25, but in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales as well. So 35 by 35 is our new ambition. If you’d like to know more about the UKLCC and the work we do, please go to our website at www.uklcc.org.uk.

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