FAST-Forward Boost passes 1,000 recruits in test of five-day breast radiotherapy

The Department of Health and Social Care said on 30 October 2026 that more than 1,000 people have enrolled in FAST-Forward Boost, a government-funded trial asking whether breast cancer radiotherapy can be compressed from 3 weeks to 5 days without loss of safety¹. In the same announcement DHSC appointed Ashley Dalton MP, who is living with metastatic breast cancer, to advise on delivery of the National Cancer Plan for England¹.

What the trial is testing

The trial pairs a shorter radiotherapy course with an extra targeted dose, called a boost, intended to lower the chance of the cancer returning¹. It is running at 39 hospitals across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, led by the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and funded through the National Institute for Health and Care Research¹. DHSC puts the potential saving at 10 hospital visits per patient¹.

Recruitment is less than a quarter complete. The target is 4,830 participants by 2028, each followed for 5 years, with results expected in 2033¹. Professor Anna Kirby of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust is the chief investigator¹.

The announcement also gave screening figures. Uptake of first breast screening invitations has reached 63.6%, the highest in a decade, yet around 4 in 10 women invited for the first time still do not attend¹. Breast Cancer Now said about 30% of female breast cancers in England are found through screening, and that 5-year survival is almost 100% at stage 1 against 32% at stage 4¹.

What it means for the market

The case DHSC makes is about capacity as much as outcomes. If the shorter schedule works, the department says it could cut travel costs and time away from work and free NHS capacity to treat more patients¹. For radiotherapy departments and the commissioners who plan linear accelerator time, fewer attendances per patient would change throughput assumptions, though no capacity or cost figures were published.

The release also states that the government, NIHR and NHS England are running trials of AI to support the analysis of mammograms¹. It gives no detail on suppliers, sites or timelines for that work, so the commercial opening for imaging AI vendors cannot be sized from this announcement. Alongside it sits a 3-year partnership with Breast Cancer Now on symptom awareness and post-treatment information, announced earlier in October under the Renewed Women's Health Strategy for England¹.

Dalton's advisory brief is to flag where delivery of the cancer plan is off track and where further intervention may be needed, and to judge whether it is improving quality of life and patient experience¹. She will work with the responsible minister, James Frith¹. The plan's headline commitment, as Dalton restated it, is that by 2035 "3 out of 4 people diagnosed with cancer will be cancer free or living well with cancer after 5 years"¹.

Caveats

This is an enrolment update, not a result. No efficacy or safety data from FAST-Forward Boost have been reported, and the visit saving is a projection that depends on the trial succeeding¹. The source is a government press release, and the AI mammography trials it mentions are described in a single sentence. The trial's results are not expected until 2033¹.