Who we are

Ninewells Cancer Campaign is the University of Dundee’s dedicated cancer research fundraising campaign. Every donation helps our researchers to find better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer.  

In our Faculties of Health and Life Sciences, we’re working to understand how cancer starts, spreads and responds to treatment. Some of this is carried out with patients and doctors at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School, and dentists at Dundee Dental Hospital, helping us improve cancer care for people right here in Tayside. 

Over £20 million raised. And counting. 

The Campaign began in 1991, when Pat McPherson and Jacqui Wood launched a £1 million appeal to build a new Biomedical Research Centre within our School of Medicine, based at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School. It’s where the Campaign gets its name. 

Local people were so generous that the Campaign kept going. Since then, fundraisers, families, patients, and businesses have since helped us build specialist facilities, bring leading cancer specialists to the University, and give early-career researchers a head start, through sponsored challenges, coffee mornings, gifts in wills, and everything in between. 

Cancer research at the University of Dundee is already making a difference to people’s lives. Our discoveries have led to 

• a simple bowel cancer test that has saved thousands of lives.  

• a class of drugs that has transformed cancer treatment around the world.  

• Tayside becoming the first region in the world to effectively eliminate hepatitis C, a major cause of liver cancer, working directly with NHS Tayside. 

But many cancers are still too hard to diagnose and too hard to treat, and Tayside has some of the highest cancer rates in Scotland. The need for answers has never been greater. 

The next breakthrough could change someone’s life. Your support could help make it possible. 

Donate now Our mission