Blood Cancer Awareness Month: the signs worth knowing, and the research changing what a diagnosis means

September is Blood Cancer Awareness Month. It's a cause that sits close to home for us. Every trial we help supply exists because someone, somewhere, agreed to take part in one, and blood cancer research has been behind some of the biggest treatment leaps in oncology this past decade. We sit on the equipment and logistics side of that work, which means we see what it produces without ever treating a patient ourselves. Awareness is a smaller thing to offer than a cure, but it costs nothing and anyone can do it, so here's our contribution for September.

A bigger part of the cancer picture than most people realise

Leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma are different diseases with different causes and treatments, but they're usually talked about together as "blood cancer" because they all start in the same place: the bone marrow and the blood and lymphatic systems that carry blood cells around the body.

Counted together, they add up to more than most people expect. Worldwide, an estimated 1.31 million people received a new blood cancer diagnosis in 2022, according to global cancer registry data published in the Chinese Medical Journal. [1] Spread across a year, that works out to a new diagnosis roughly every two and a half minutes, somewhere in the world.

Exactly where it ranks against other cancers depends on which country's figures you use. In Australia, leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma taken together are officially the third most commonly diagnosed cancer group, and the second most deadly. [2] In the UK, Blood Cancer UK puts it fifth. [3] Either way, most people would guess lower, and that's really the point of an awareness month: closing the gap between how common something is and how much people think about it.

The symptoms are easy to mistake for something else

That gap matters because blood cancer symptoms rarely announce themselves. Most overlap with things people already write off as run-down, over-worked, or getting older, which is part of why diagnosis so often comes later than it should.

It's worth getting checked if any of these turn up without an obvious cause, and especially if more than one shows up together:

• Bruises or bleeding that appear without any injury to explain them
• Aching or pain in your bones or joints that isn't linked to an injury and is bad enough to disrupt sleep or your usual routine
• A feeling of fullness, bloating or discomfort in your abdomen that doesn't have an obvious cause
• Infections that keep coming back, won't clear up, or hit harder than they used to
• A fever or raised temperature with no clear trigger
• Losing weight without changing your diet or activity levels
• Exhaustion that doesn't lift, however much rest or sleep you get
• New lumps or swelling anywhere on the body
• Night sweats heavy enough to soak your sheets or nightwear
• Skin that looks unusually pale
• Getting out of breath doing things that never used to leave you breathless
• An itchy rash or itchy skin with no obvious trigger that doesn't settle down even with treatment

None of these confirm a blood cancer on their own, and most people with one or two of them won't have cancer. But they're worth taking to a GP rather than sitting on, and if you're unsure whether what you're experiencing is worth flagging, Blood Cancer Awareness's symptom checker is a free, few-minutes tool built to help you work that out before you go.

None of these confirm a blood cancer on their own, and most people with one or two of them won't have cancer. But they're worth taking to a GP rather than sitting on, and if you're unsure whether what you're experiencing is worth flagging, Blood Cancer Awareness's symptom checker is a free, few-minutes tool built to help you work that out before you go.

What clinical research has already delivered

This part of the story gets less airtime than the statistics, and it shouldn't. Blood cancer treatment has changed more in the last ten years than most other cancers, and nearly all of that change started life inside a clinical trial.

CAR-T cell therapy is the clearest example. It reprogrammes a patient's own immune cells to recognise and attack their cancer, and it was still an experimental idea a decade ago. In June 2026, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published ten-year follow-up data on 38 people with aggressive lymphoma who'd already been through a median of four prior treatments and had few options left. A third of those with large B-cell lymphoma and nearly half of those with follicular lymphoma were still alive and cancer-free at the ten-year mark, and nobody in the group who reached five years relapsed after that point. [4] For patients who'd run out of standard options, that's a genuinely different outlook, and it exists because people agreed to be among the first to try it.

Myeloma has seen similar movement. At the end of 2025, Memorial Sloan Kettering reported results from a trial combining two bispecific antibodies, teclistamab and talquetamab, in patients with extramedullary myeloma that had stopped responding to every major class of standard treatment. Nearly 79% responded to the combination, median progression-free survival stretched to 15.4 months against under three months on standard therapy, and three-quarters of patients were still alive a year in, against a five-month median survival for that group beforehand. [5] Around the same time, the Phase 3 MajesTEC-3 trial found that pairing teclistamab with daratumumab kept 83.4% of patients free of disease progression at three years, against 29.7% on standard second-line therapy, with more than half reaching undetectable levels of disease compared with roughly one in six on the older regimen. [6]

None of it happens without patients choosing to enrol, or without the trial sites, labs and supply chains built to support them once they do. That's the part we work on: things like point-of-care coagulation testing and the cryogenic cold chain that keeps a CAR-T product alive between manufacture and infusion.

If you or someone close to you is thinking about taking part in a trial, Blood Cancer UK's guide to what to expect walks through the practical side, from eligibility and time commitment to the right to leave at any point. Blood Cancer Awareness's trial search tool is a good starting point for finding trials that match a specific diagnosis and location.

Doing our bit

We're not a charity and we're not a research team. We're a supplier that happens to be close enough to this work to see what it produces, and results like the ones above are the reason blood cancer patients today have options that didn't exist when we started in this industry. Awareness months don't cure anything on their own, but they get more people checking a symptom they'd otherwise have shrugged off, and that's a useful way to spend September.

If you want to know more about how we support haematology and cell therapy trials, take a look at our haematology page.

Sources
1. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1121283
2. https://www.leukaemia.org.au/advocacy-and-policy/state-of-the-nation/
3. https://bloodcancer.org.uk/news/blood-cancer-facts/
4. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319061/20260625/car-t-cell-therapy-hits-10-year-lymphoma-remission-mark-no-relapses-past-year-5-nejm-data.htm
5. https://www.mskcc.org/news/new-extramedullary-myeloma-treatment-with-bispecific-antibodies-improves-survival-dramatically
6. https://www.hematology.org/newsroom/press-releases/2025/lba-6