Cancer Through the Lens of Infection: Roundtable Explores Overlooked Threat to Cancer Outcomes

Yesterday, Dr Beccy Cooper MP, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), convened a meeting to explore an important but often overlooked issue in cancer care: the impact of infection and AMR on cancer outcomes.

The discussion was prompted by the publication of England’s new National Cancer Plan. While the Plan sets out an ambitious vision for improving cancer outcomes, infection and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are not addressed within the strategy.

Given the role that infection plays in treatment and survival, attendees explored how greater recognition of infection and AMR could help strengthen the Plan and further improve outcomes for patients.

Surviving Cancer Also Means Surviving Infection

Powerful contributions from patients, researchers and frontline clinicians highlighted why this matters.

Dr Nveed Chaudhary, founder of the Jibraan Chaudhary Sepsis Research Foundation, spoke about the loss of his son, Jibraan, to a drug-resistant infection during cancer treatment and the urgent need to better integrate infection into cancer policy and research. As he told attendees:

“Sepsis and infection in cancer patients is undermining all the developments we’ve made in chemotherapy over the last 30 to 40 years.”

Angela Monzon, who is undergoing treatment for stage 4 bowel cancer and has experienced sepsis during her cancer journey, reminded the room that:

“Cancer care should never focus solely on treating the tumour. It must also protect patients from the complications that determine whether they survive long enough to benefit from treatment.”

She added:

“If we truly want better outcomes, we must recognise that surviving cancer also means surviving infection.”

Rethinking Cancer Outcomes

Bob Phillips, Professor of Evidence Synthesis and Paediatrics at the University of York and a Paediatric Oncologist, highlighted that some of the most significant gains in childhood leukaemia survival came not from new cancer therapies, but from the introduction of broad-spectrum antibiotics that enabled clinicians to safely deliver intensive chemotherapy. He warned that AMR risks undermining decades of progress. He challenged how success in cancer care is measured, arguing that:

“The important thing is that patients with cancer survive. Not that patients with cancer get rid of their cancer.”

He also noted that, in children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, around half of those who die in the lower-risk group die because of infection rather than their cancer. This underlined a key theme of the discussion: that helping cancer patients survive depends not only on treating the cancer, but also on preventing, diagnosing and managing infection throughout the cancer pathway.

Understanding the Scale of the Challenge

Dr Alicia Demirjian, Consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases, UKHSA epidemiologist, and Vice President of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC), highlighted that people with cancer develop drug-resistant infections at higher rates than those without cancer, with around one in three bacterial infections in this group being resistant. She also noted that, despite how clear the clinical problem is, we are not yet routinely able to link cancer, infection, treatment and outcome data across England. This limits our ability to fully understand the risk.

Looking to the future, Iyiola Oladunjoye, a DPhil researcher at the University of Oxford, and a BSAC Parliamentary Intern in Dr Beccy Cooper MP’s office, emphasised that many of the innovations championed within the National Cancer Plan ultimately depend on effective infection prevention and treatment. As he told the roundtable:

“Infection control is not separate from cancer care. It is cancer care.”

Visibility and Awareness

A further theme emerged around visibility and awareness. Liz Callegari, who is supporting the impact campaign for the forthcoming BBC/HBO documentary Superbugs, argued that AMR is as much a communications challenge as a scientific one. Despite the threat that resistant infections pose to cancer care, public awareness remains limited. The discussion raised important questions about whether this lack of visibility has contributed to infection and AMR receiving less attention within wider cancer policy discussions than their impact on patient outcomes would warrant.

Practical Opportunities for Action

Alongside these powerful personal and clinical perspectives, discussion focused on practical opportunities to strengthen outcomes through better recognition of infection and AMR in cancer care, improved data and measurement, support for rapid infection diagnostics, infection prevention, antimicrobial stewardship, and a greater focus on protecting vulnerable and immunocompromised patients.

Next Steps

The APPG will now consider the issues and recommendations raised during the roundtable, including how existing commitments within the National Cancer Plan could be further strengthened to ensure that infection and AMR are fully recognised as part of delivering better outcomes for people with cancer.

Thank you to everyone who contributed their expertise and lived experience to such a thoughtful and constructive discussion.