Two largest cancer charities to merge

The Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund are to merge.  Barring any last minute legal hitches, by the time you read this the Charities Commission will have ratified the move and the new charity - Cancer Research UK - will have come into being.

The merger will bring together 3,000 of the country's top researchers and doctors in the new organisation with an annual scientific budget of 130 million pounds.  Heading the new charity will be Sir Paul Nurse, who shared this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine with Briton Timothy Hunt and American Leland Hartwell for their ground-breaking work on cell division.  The Co-Director is Professor Gordon McVie, an oncologist who has headed up the Cancer Research Campaign for the past five years.

The merger brings the two charities, which started as one in 1902, full circle.  The Imperial Cancer Research Fund was the first independent institute in Europe devoted to cancer research.  In 1923 a group of doctors broke away and formed what became the Cancer Research Campaign.

Between them these two charities, now to be one, fund two thirds of all cancer research in the UK with annual funding of around £130 million.

Cancer Research UK will be the largest such charity outside the US.  There is very little overlap between the two merging charities but an estimated 130 jobs, mainly administrative and support staff, will be lost.

Why are they combining in this way?  To achieve more effective fund raising, to create a more effective voice with Government and to eliminate confusion among the public.

These are three ambitions shared by much smaller, focussed charities such as the Prostate Research Campaign UK.  The merger gives us much to think about.