As with all aspects of our lives, the pandemic has had a significant impact on our ability to fund research to the extent we need to and for the researchers that we currently invest in to deliver their work.
Lockdown restrictions have meant our supporters have not been able to take part in most of our fundraising events for 2020; reducing our charitable income by almost half. This money would fund the next steps for our vital research and its loss puts critical progress at stake.
Supporting our research community
Inevitably, social distancing measures, lockdown and the redeployment of staff to urgent frontline care have had an impact on our research. We’ve supported our researchers and the clinical community to keep research going, where possible.
Where it was impossible to carry on studies as intended we have supported and enabled our researchers to join front line care, run Covid-19 treatment and vaccine trials, and help in testing labs. Some researchers also took the opportunity out the lab train in new skills, write up and share research findings, plan new studies and engaged and involve people with lived experience of pancreatic cancer in the development and delivery of their work. However, the researchers we support are as dedicated to improving the lives of people with pancreatic cancer as we are. Their resilience, innovation and commitment to their work is truly inspirational and as a result the impact on the research they carry out was minimised at every opportunity and all our funded research is back up and running and in some cases, never stopped.
Here are just a few examples of how our researchers found innovative ways to keep research going during the pandemic:
