While survival rates vary widely between different types of cancer, the overall five-year survival rate is now 49.6% for patients diagnosed with cancer in England and Wales between 2000 and 2001, the charity said.
The figures showed that the sharpest rise in overall cancer survival rates between 1971 and 2001 has happened in the last 10 years.
During that period, the combined cancer survival rate rose from 35.4% to 46.2%.
The charity said improvements in the management of cancer over the last three decades had led to significantly better survival rates.
Early detection of cancer, greater use of specialist surgery, screening programmes to detect cancer at an earlier stage and advances in chemotherapy and radiotherapy have all helped to bump up rates.
Looking at 10-year survival rates for men and women combined, it can be seen that rates have gone up for colon cancer from 25.3% in 1971/72 to 43.8% in 2000/01.
Prostate cancer survival rates have gone up from 21% to 48.8% in the same period, while breast cancer rates have gone up from 40.7% to 71.5%.
However, survival rates for pancreatic, lung and oesophageal cancer have not improved.
Cancer Research UK set out 10 ambitious goals to be achieved by 2020.
The first is that three-quarters of the British public will be aware of the main lifestyle choices they can make to reduce their risks of cancer.
At present less than a quarter can name three or more risk factors from a list including smoking, excessive drinking, obesity and an unhealthy diet.
The second goal is that four million fewer adults will be smokers, which will prevent thousands of new cases of cancer every year.
The charity said its third goal was for the likelihood of a person under 75 developing cancer to fall from more than one in four to one in five, while the fourth aim was for two-thirds of all cancer cases to be diagnosed at a stage when the cancer can successfully be treated.
At present around 45% of cases are currently diagnosed at a stage where treatment is effective.
The charity also aims to have a "detailed understanding" of the causes and changes in the body in two-thirds of all cancer cases, up from the present rate of around half.
Its sixth goal is that at least half of all patients will have access to treatments which accurately target the cancer and have few serious side- effects - double the present figure of around 25%.
The last four goals relate to increasing survival rates for all common cancers, tackling inequality in death rates between the least deprived areas and most deprived areas of the UK, accessing better information and ensuring an infrastructure is in place to continue the fight against cancer beyond 2020.
Professor Michel Coleman, professor of epidemiology and vital statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said cancer still presented a "major public health problem", accounting for around a quarter of all deaths.
Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said there was a lot to celebrate in the figures being released today.
He added: "We really are here to celebrate the success that has been achieved over the last 30 years with survival rates improving really quite dramatically.
"But the other key message is that we have a lot further to go."
Copyright Press Association 2007.
