Celebrated as Britains oldest path, your 100km route on the Race to the Stones follows the historic trail past Waylands Smithy, Uffington White Horse and Barbury Castle before reaching the iconic ancient Stone Circle at Avebury.

All funds raised through the challenge will go towards the funding of the Trials Acceleration Programme (TAP) across the UK. TAP is a network of specialist research nurses located in the UKs biggest hospitals and a facilitatory Hub based at the Centre for Clinical Haematology at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. TAP enables pioneering blood cancer clinical trials to be setup, opened, recruited to and delivered at an accelerated rate benefitting a UK catchment area of over 20 million people. TAP can setup a new clinical trial in as little as six months, a process that otherwise could take up to two years enabling patients that have exhausted standard treatments for blood cancer to access potentially life-saving options.

Without the network of highly skilled research nurses located at University College London Hospital, Guys and St Thomas, Southampton, Cardiff, Oxford, Nottingham, Birmingham, Sheffield, The Christie, Leeds, Glasgow and Belfast and the TAP Hub consisting of Trial Co-ordinators and statisticians to facilitate the trials and analyse the data they produce; these trials simply would not run at such an accelerated rate.

The importance of TAP has been highlighted by Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford & member of the governments vaccine task force:

On World Cancer Day this year we announced that TAP would be opening 5 new clinical trials in 2021 despite the impact of COVID-19 and, as yet, we have received no reply from Chancellor Rishi Sunak MP to our letter requesting financial support from the government in 2020. Many of our funded nurses have been re-deployed at the height of the pandemic to help hospital ICU departments cope with the surge of COVID patients, making a direct impact on the national effort to combat the virus but, sadly, we are yet to have a reply to this letter nearly 12 months on.

Despite these challenges we remain positive about the year and your generosity will enable us to take a step closer to the ultimate goal of finding a cure.