Sheffield's Weston Park is a cancer hospital which people hold dear

She is a consultant giving chemotherapy and other drugs to patients with the most severe skin cancer, melanoma and lung cancer. She also runs early phase clinical trials treating patients with all types of cancer with new drugs.

She said: “Early phase trials are trials for when drugs are first being given to patients. We start looking for the right dose to give to patients and then search for proof that the drug works in different cancers. This all happens before we compare the new treatments to the usual care given in the NHS in late phase trials.

“When I was appointed to work in Sheffield in 2006, there was a limited amount of early phase cancer research happening.

“I came to Sheffield to work with Prof Penella Woll to increase this so that patients had more treatments available locally.

“We became an Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre in 2007 which means we are part of the national ECMC network treating patients in early phase trials.

“We now have many more treatment options for patients with cancer, locally and nationally. For example, in melanoma we had very limited options when I started here but new treatments – immunotherapy and targeted BRAF drugs – have changed that”.

“Sheffield patients took part in a trial with ipilimumab, an immunotherapy drug, which was the first drug to increase the length of time that patients with advanced melanoma.”