Royal Marsden receives largest-ever single donation of £25m
Melanie May | 7 June 2018 | News
The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust has received a £25million donation towards a new cancer facility.
The £25 million lead gift comes from its long-term supporter, Oak Foundation, and takes the Trust’s fundraising total for the new centre over halfway to target. HRH The Duke of Cambridge, President of The Royal Marsden, launched the appeal for the new centre in 2015.
Due to open in 2021 on the Trust’s Sutton site, The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity needs to raise £70 million to build the new Oak Cancer Centre. The Centre will place over 300 researchers alongside patients with the most challenging and rare cancers, putting patients at the heart of research and helping to speed up the development of new treatments to improve survival.
The £25 million donation from Oak Foundation, a family-led foundation formally established in 1983, is The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity’s largest single donation to date, and takes the total amount donated by Oak Foundation to date to £43 million.
Oak Foundation has supported The Royal Marsden for 15 years; they donated the lead gift for The Royal Marsden’s Oak Centre for Children and Young People, which was opened by TRH The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011, and have made an important contribution to drug development, in particular helping to find new treatments for children and young people with hard to treat cancers.
Professor David Cunningham, Director of Clinical Research at The Royal Marsden, said:
“I’d like to thank Oak Foundation for this incredibly generous gift. Through pioneering new treatments and proving their effectiveness, the work carried out in the Oak Cancer Centre will benefit patients not just at The Royal Marsden, but throughout the UK and beyond.”
Main image: Architect’s drawing of the new Oak Cancer Centre.
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.