I'm part of Team AllTogether, Alltogether are a group taking part in this years Race For Life @ Royal Windsor RaceCourse the members of the team so far are my mum, my daughter & a family friend.We are hoping more people will join our team.

Lets grow the vision to avail the info to all everywhere through advocacy

. Why Donations Matter So Much
Every two minutes someone in the UK is told they have Cancer.
Today,twice as many people survive Cancer as they did forty years ago.
Thats twice as many mums and dads who get to see their kids grow up.
Twice as many couples who have a chance to grow old together.
Twice as many children with the chance of a healthy future .
And thats ALL down to people that take part in Race For Life,
But more importantly its down to the people who are kind enough to sponsor us.
The money you donate will help Cancer Research make great breakthoughs.
It will help fund World-leading scientific Research that will result in more effective treatments.
Treatments that are more likely to work and have fewer side effects.

THATS WHY YOUR DONATIONS ARE SO VITAL.

Things your donations buy:
1pound = will buy 11 'cryotubes' designed to help scientists store precious samples at chilled tempertatures.
5pound = will buy 150 glass slides that scientists can use to study cells and tumour samples under microscope.
10pound = will buy 80 Petri dishes scientists use to grow cells in the lab, helping their groundbreaking work to understand Cancer.

Copied and pasted from Cancer Research site:

All about cancer

People often think of the word cancer as describing a single disease with a single cause, like 'flu or HIV. But this is misleading.

Cancer is the name given to a range of specific illnesses resulting from one of our body's own cells growing out of control. There are more than 200 different types of cancer, each with different causes and symptoms requiring different treatments.

In this section you can find out how cancer develops, how it is treated, and how we're tackling it through ground-breaking research. It is only through research that we can understand cancer and develop more effective ways to beat it.

In this section you can find out how cancer starts, how it grows and spreads, and why it makes people ill. And you can discover how Cancer Research UK scientists have transformed our understanding of the disease

What causes cancer?

There are many things that can cause cancer and many things that people wrongly believe cause the disease. And for many cancers, we simply dont know the cause.

The fundamental cause of cancer is damaged or faulty genes the instructions that tell our cells what to do. Genes are encoded within DNA, so anything that damages DNA can increase the risk of cancer. But a number of genes in the same cell need to be damaged before it becomes cancerous.

Most cancers are caused by DNA damage that accumulates over a person's lifetime. Cancers that are directly caused by specific genetic faults inherited from a parent are rare. But we all have subtle variations in our genes that may increase or decrease our risk of cancer by a small amount.

So cancer risk isn't all in the genes, and it's not all down to lifestyle - it's a combination of the two.

Age
Age is the single biggest risk factor for cancer the older you are, the more likely you are to develop cancer. Nearly two-thirds of all cases of cancer diagnosed in the UK occur in people over 65 years old. This is because the longer we live, the more cancer-causing faults we accumulate in our DNA.

It also explains why more people are getting cancer nowadays. Thanks to advances in public health and the prevention of infectious diseases, we live much longer, increasing our chances of picking up cancer-causing DNA faults.

Lifestyle

Up to half of all cancers could be prevented by changes to lifestyle, and there are many things we can do to try to reduce the risk of the disease.

These include giving up smoking, enjoying the sun safely, eating a healthy balanced diet, limiting alcohol, keeping physically active and sticking to a healthy bodyweight.

DNA damage
DNA damage is extremely common - some studies suggest that the DNA in a single human cell gets damaged over 10,000 times every day.

For a start, the life-sustaining chemical reactions that occur naturally in our cells generate harmful by-products, and these can cause DNA damage. So merely being alive leads to DNA damage and this can potentially cause cancer.

Also our everyday surroundings are full of things that constantly damage the DNA in our cells, known as carcinogens.

Although our cells are very good at repairing this damage, errors can accumulate over the years. This explains why cancer usually affects older people.

Carcinogens
Carcinogen literally means something that causes cancer. Carcinogens damage DNA, causing faults in important genes that can lead to cancer. Examples include:

Tobacco
Car exhaust fumes and air pollution
The sun
Natural and man-made radiation, such as radon gas or X-rays
Asbestos
But it is a mistake to believe that exposure to carcinogens is the only cause of cancer. In almost all cases, carcinogens are contributing factors, but there is a whole host of other factors at work, including a person's lifestyle and genetic makeup.

Inherited gene faults
Some people are born with a fault in one of their genes. This does not mean that they will ever actually develop cancer, but it does mean that fewer other things need to go wrong with the rest of their DNA for the disease to develop.

For example, women born with a mutation in one of their BRCA genes have a much greater chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer than women who do not. Faults in a BRCA gene can also increase a man's risk of prostate cancer.

People with a strong family history of these cancers can go for genetic testing, to find out whether they carry the faulty gene. Those at risk may be offered prevention advice or treatment to help reduce their chances of getting cancer, or screening to detect it at an early stage.

Cancer Research UK scientists have played a major role in discovering some of the gene faults involved in cancer, and we continue to fund ground-breaking work in this area.

Viruses
Some viruses are linked to certain types of cancer. This does not mean that these cancers spread from person to person like an infection - you cannot 'catch' cancer - and does not mean that everyone infected with these viruses will develop cancer.

Our researchers are working hard to understand how viruses can cause cancer, and why some people are susceptible to developing the disease while others aren't.

Some examples include:

Human papilloma virus (HPV) is the major cause of cervical cancer
Hepatitis B and C viruses can cause primary liver cancer
Human T-cell leukaemia virus can cause leukaemia
Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) can occasionally cause some types of childhood cancers, carcinomas and lymphomas. Exactly how it does this, and under which cir tances, is not well understood.
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is linked to several cancers as it weakens the immune system (see below)
Kaposi sarcoma virus (KSV) causes a type of soft tissue cancer, particularly in people with HIV/AIDS
There are examples of infectious tumours in dogs and Tasmanian Devils, where cancer cells can directly transfer from one animal to another. But there is no evidence for these kinds of tumours in humans.

Problems with the immune system
People who have problems with their immune system are at higher risk of developing cancer, probably because they are less able to combat infections by viruses that are linked to the disease (see above).

This group includes people who have had an organ transplant and are taking drugs to suppress their immune responses, as well as people with diseases that affect the immune system, such as HIV/AIDS.

People who are born with one of several rare genetic diseases that affect their immune system - such as ataxia telangiectasia or A-T - are also at higher risk of developing cancer.

*PLEASE NOTE* All information added by me above is copied & pasted from the Cancer Research Site

Copied from Cancer Research site:
Research Highlights

Cancer Research UK funds research on all aspects of cancer, from the most basic nuts-and-bolts of cell biology to large studies of entire populations.

We fund the work of over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses across the UK, and run specialised institutes dedicated to cancer research.

I'm very sorry but I can't copy and paste all the info from this section of the site as there is just to much.
I've copied the address to the site using a mobile so not 100% if it will work on laptop http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerandresearch/ourcurrentresearch/
Research Highlights : Cancer Research UK

By donating to someone taking part in the Race For Life :

Youre helping Cancer Research save lives through groundbreaking research

The team work on the causes and prevention of cancer has saved millions of lives across the world. Over the next decade they aim to save many more.

Cancer survival rates have doubled in the last 40 years and our work has been at the heart of that progress.

They fund the work of more than 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses throughout the UK and support over 200 clinical trials, testing vital new drugs and treatments for cancer.

Copied from Cancer Research site :
Cancer Research UK is the largest single funder of cancer research in the UK and the world's largest charity dedicated to cancer research.

Our history and impact stretches back over a century, and on the following pages you can find out about some of our most important successes, and the progress we're making in beating cancer.

A century of progress

Cancer Research UK was formed in 2002, following the merger of The Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, first established back in 1902.

We are now the biggest single independent funder of cancer research in Europe, supporting the work of more than 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses across the UK

Our progress and achievements from 1902 to 1959

Cancer Research UK's history dates back to the turn of the 20th century. Back then, there were few treatments for cancer, and even fewer that were effective.

But cancer wasn't the major cause of death - assuming it was correctly diagnosed. That dubious honour went to infectious diseases such as smallpox, measles and typhus.

But our scientists were still working hard, starting to understand cancer and how to treat it.