A UK government cancer plan naming brain tumours as a national priority, two vaccine trials reporting results that outstrip historical survival figures and a Scottish-born gene therapy heading into its first patient. After decades of little movement, several strands of progress are now converging at once.

Brain tumours have a grim reputation in oncology, and it is not undeserved. More than 12,700 people are diagnosed with one in the UK each year, and the disease remains the biggest cancer killer of children and adults under 40. Five-year survival across all brain tumour types sits at just 13%, a figure that has barely shifted in a generation. Glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive form in adults, typically carries a prognosis of only 12 to 18 months even with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Part of the reason progress has been so slow is structural rather than purely biological. Brain tumours receive only around 3% of national cancer research funding in the UK, despite the scale of the disease’s impact, and charities rather than government have historically carried the larger share of that investment. That imbalance is now being addressed, and alongside it, several separate research programmes are reporting results that suggest the underlying science may finally be catching up with the need.

A National Cancer Plan With Brain Tumours in the Text

On 4 February 2026, the Department of Health and Social Care published the National Cancer Plan for England and for the first time gave explicit focus to rare and less survivable cancers, brain tumours among them. The plan commits to improving access to clinical trials for rare cancer patients, expanding genomic testing as part of routine care and reducing the proportion of cancers diagnosed through emergency presentation, which for high-grade brain tumours currently accounts for almost half of all diagnoses.

The plan is also attached to new money. The £13.7 million NIHR Brain Tumour Research Consortium, announced as part of this renewed investment, brings together 48 hospitals, universities, cancer centres and charities in a national research partnership, the kind of coordinated infrastructure that the field has long lacked. Dr Michele Afif, Chief Executive of The Brain Tumour Charity, called the plan “a meaningful shift in how brain tumours are prioritised within cancer planning in England”, while noting that its commitments will only matter if they are delivered and properly tracked. The plan applies to England only, and campaigners continue to press for equivalent action in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where cancer policy is devolved.

Two Vaccines, Two Different Targets

Against that policy backdrop, two vaccine trials reported results in 2026 that mark genuine clinical progress rather than early-stage promise alone.

The first, published in Nature Cancer in July, comes from the long-running NOA16 trial led by researchers at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), Mannheim University Medical Centre and Heidelberg University Hospital. The vaccine targets a mutation in the IDH1 enzyme that is present in the majority of diffuse gliomas and creates a novel protein structure that is both a driver of tumour growth and a target the immune system can be trained to recognise. In a Phase 1 trial of 33 patients with newly diagnosed high-grade astrocytoma, 66% were still alive after eight years of follow-up, and in 42% of cases the disease had not progressed. Historical median survival for these more aggressive tumour types has typically been in the range of two and a half to five years. Lukas Bunse, head of the Neuro-Oncology Section at Mannheim and the study’s first author, noted that the mutation “appears early in tumour development and, crucially, remains stable even as the tumour cells evolve”, which is precisely what makes it a durable vaccine target. A multicentre, randomised Phase 2 trial is now being planned with funding from Germany’s National Center for Tumor Diseases.

The second approach tackles a harder problem: glioblastoma itself, rather than the lower-grade gliomas that often carry the IDH1 mutation. At the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s 2026 Annual Meeting in May, David Reardon and Catherine Wu of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute presented Phase 1 results for NeoVax, a personalised neoantigen peptide vaccine combined with the checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab, in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma. Of 39 enrolled patients, 37 began the regimen. Median overall survival reached 36.9 months in patients with MGMT-methylated tumours (against a historical figure of 25.3 months) and 19.0 months in MGMT-unmethylated patients (against a historical 16.7 months). Vaccine-specific T cells were confirmed to have migrated into the brain and into tumour tissue itself, evidence that the immune response was not confined to the bloodstream. Reardon was careful to caution that the study was not a direct comparison against a control arm, but described the results as “encouraging” in a disease where meaningful immunotherapy gains have been difficult to achieve.

A Gene Therapy Built to Finish the Job

A third approach, still earlier in development but backed by substantial investment, comes out of the University of Edinburgh. Trogenix, a biotech company co-founded by Professor Steve Pollard of Edinburgh’s Scottish Brain Tumour Research Centre of Excellence, has raised £70 million to progress a viral immunotherapy for glioblastoma towards its first clinical trial, with dosing of the first patient anticipated in early 2026.

The treatment uses a harmless adeno-associated virus to deliver a piece of engineered DNA directly into the tumour. Once inside a glioblastoma cell, a synthetic super enhancer acts as a sensor that switches on only in aggressive tumour cells, triggering the production of an enzyme that converts an oral drug into a toxin that kills the cell and its neighbours, alongside a signal called IL-12 that activates the wider immune system. The intention, according to Dr Karen Noble, Director of Research, Policy and Innovation at Brain Tumour Research, is to “selectively destroy glioblastoma cells while also stimulating the immune system to provide long-term protection against tumour recurrence”: a single treatment designed to clear the tumour and prevent it returning, rather than a course of therapy that needs to be repeated.

Why This Matters Now

None of these developments amounts to a cure, and researchers involved in all three programmes have been careful to say so. Phase 1 and early Phase 2 data, however promising, still need to be replicated in larger, controlled trials before they change standard practice. But taken together, a coordinated national funding programme, two vaccine approaches with genuinely improved survival data and a gene therapy platform now entering patients represent more simultaneous progress than the field has seen in years.

What connects them is also instructive. Each approach works by teaching the immune system to recognise something specific to the tumour, whether a shared genetic mutation, a patient’s own tumour-specific neoantigens or a synthetic switch engineered to activate only inside cancer cells. For a disease that has resisted conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy for decades, that shared logic, treat the tumour as something the immune system can be taught to remember, may turn out to be the more durable route forward.

Sources include the Department of Health and Social Care, The Brain Tumour Charity, Brain Tumour Research, the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), Nature Cancer, ecancer, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.