Earlier diagnosis of cancer saves lives. However, only 54.4% of cancers in England are currently diagnosed at stages one and two, where treatment is more likely to be successful.
Cancer Research UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced an exciting research project that could enable doctors to better predict and prevent cancer.
Supported by Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) and partners, the Cancer Data-Driven Detection (CD3) programme will receive £10 million to create new tools using AI and state-of-the-art analytics that will help scientists accurately predict who is most likely to get cancer.
Vast quantities of secure data will be harnessed to improve the detection and diagnosis of cancer at its earliest stages. The programme aims to access and link data from different sources –such as health records, genomics, family history, demographics, environmental, and behavioural data – to develop advanced statistical models and powerful AI data analysis tools, which will help identify an individual’s risk of cancer throughout their lifetime.
Over the next five years, the funding will support the programme to build the infrastructure required to access and link health-related datasets, train new data scientists, create the algorithms behind the risk models, and evaluate the algorithms and AI tools to ensure that they are giving accurate and clinically useful information about cancer risk. The scientific programme will be guided by partnerships with cancer patients, the public, clinical experts and industry, while addressing ethical and legal considerations to ensure that the models and tools work well in practice.
Professor Antonis Antoniou, Director of the Cancer Data Driven Detection programme and Professor of Cancer Risk Prediction at the University of Cambridge, said: “Finding people at the highest risk of developing cancer, including those with vague symptoms, is a major challenge. The UK’s strengths in population-scale data resources, combined with advanced analytical tools like AI, offer tremendous opportunities to link disparate datasets and uncover clues that could lead to earlier detection, diagnosis and prevention of more cancers.”
