About The Zdenko Kos Foundation
The Foundation (Charity’s) primary objectives are to support medical research of all kinds, with a particular emphasis on cancer research; to support emerging visual and performing artists and talented athletes; and to provide opportunities in sport, including water sports, for disadvantaged young people across the United Kingdom and Europe.
The Zdenko Kos Foundation works with communities and network partners across the United Kingdom and Europe to connect the people, data and resources needed to address complex health challenges, including cancer and other medical conditions. It also seeks to improve people’s lives by supporting education, policy development, research and systemic change that can deliver measurable and sustainable benefits for those affected by illness or difficult living circumstances.
A multidisciplinary team of nearly 200 highly qualified scientists, doctors, surgeons, consultants, researchers and laboratory specialists began its research in 2011–2012. Hospital-based clinical trials commenced in December 2014, and the work was conducted across the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. Rather than being suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic, the programme intensified as many team members had greater availability while their usual hospital work was placed on hold because of government restrictions.
Over the years, the team expanded to include 472 specialists supported by a further 192 staff members. Collectively, they worked across 265 hospitals, with some individuals working in three or four hospitals at the same time, as well as 58 laboratories. The wider team also included 43 freelancers, while other members operated their own private clinics or laboratories, including the founder’s facility in Switzerland.
The research was fully funded from the outset, with an initial budget of £308.2 million provided by supporters, financiers and donors who shared the team’s ambition to advance cancer research. By November 2024, expenditure had reached £498.6 million. In 2025, founder Zdenko Kos contributed a further £104.2 million to accelerate the programme towards completion.
By 30 December 2025, total expenditure had reached £602.8 million.
Drawing on its collective expertise and sustained commitment, the team completed its research and reported highly promising results, including the identification of medications and treatment techniques that it considers to be among the most effective in their respective fields.
Understanding of Cancer's has grown substantially over the past 14 years.
The Kos Foundation is building on this momentum to explore prevention of the disease and transform diagnosis and treatments.
Years of work spent uncovering Cancer’s secrets > defining the highly variable patient experience, shedding light on genetic origins of disease, mapping molecular pathways — are now paying off in a tangible quickening tempo of scientific progress.
Investigators are increasingly linking cellular pathology to outward clinical symptoms (and vice versa) to identify new therapeutic and biomarker targets. This has positioned drug makers to make rapid inroads toward treatments that have the potential to slow or stop progression of Cancer's disease (CD).
The field also is closer than ever to arriving at therapies that can treat all the symptoms of CD, including the less well understood non-visible aspects, such as eg. with brain cancer patients persistently feeling sick (nausea), being sick (vomiting) and drowsiness, mental or behavioural changes, such as memory problems or changes in personality, progressive weakness or paralysis on one side of the body up to vision or speech problems.