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Amount spent on cancer research in 2014£402,170,502
Source: I went to https://hrcsonline.net/reports/analysis-reports/uk-health-research-analysis-2014/, and clicked on public dataset (.xlsx). I then added up the items labelled "Cancer" in the data pivot tab
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The cancer survival rate has gone from24%
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to50%
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Over the course of40years
Source: cancer research UK accounts http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/sites/default/files/cruk_annual_report_and_accounts_2014_15.pdf
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Estimated total cost of achieving this£16,086,820,080
Have assumed that the costs have beens steady over time, I suspect they have probably been increasing, so this may overstate the costs somewhat
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How many DALYs did this avert?
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How many DALYs in the UK?17,234,736
Source: I went to https://ourworldindata.org/burden-of-disease, and then downloaded disease-burden-by-region.csv, then I picked up the most recent (2016) figure for the UK
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What proportion are attributable to cancer?18.91%
Source: ultimately from https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/ -- I downloaded the data into a spreadsheet and then added up the %ages related to cancer
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How many cancer DALYs in the UK?3,259,089
Product of previous two numbers
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How much reduction in overall disability burden?
25%
Note that this is taken from the mortality burden, so it's not clear that the morbidity burden will necessary go in parallel, but that's a reasonable assumption for a rough calc like this
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How many cancer DALYs averted in the UK?814,772per year
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What's the counterfactual?
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If the philanthropically funded research hadn't happened, cancer survival rates would probably have been improved in some other way
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E.g. government-funded research would have found the same findings (albeit later)
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E.g. if the research intended to solve cancer hadn't caused a reduction in cancer, research into something else (maybe something of general health relevance?) may have
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So the outcomes of the research are to accelerate the progress
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How many years is it accelerated by?5years
Source: speculation
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Total DALYs averted4,073,861
Note: no discounting applied (that would probably be spurious accuracy) Haven't taken into account future population growth.
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Cost per DALY£3,949
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Cost per DALY, rounded£4,000
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This assumes, generously, that the improvement in cancer survival rates is solely down to cancer research
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For example, reductions in smoking rates may have contributed, as well as a number of other factors
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