Oxfordshire prostate cancer survivor welcomes new research as 'transformative'
Prostate Cancer UK has funded a 1.5 million pound project which uses AI and genetic analysis, quickly giving patients treatment before it spreads.
A survivor of prostate cancer from Oxfordshire says new research helping give men a greater certainty of longer and healthier lives is 'transformative'.
Prostate Cancer UK has funded a £1.5 million pound project which uses AI and genetic analysis, quickly giving patients treatment before it spreads.
Tim Scane is from Didcot and was been diagnosed with the cancer a couple years ago:
"I think it's really exciting. We have the blood tests, which we've had for a while, but they're not clear cut. So having this new regime gives doctors another weapon in their armoury.
1 in 8 men will get prostate cancer , and sadly lots of these men will have aggressive disease that spreads and becomes incurable quickly – but at the moment it’s hard for doctors to know which men this will happen to.
This new £1.5 million project, harnessing artificial intelligence and cutting-edge genetic analysis, could arm doctors with a tool that predicts whether a man’s prostate cancer will be aggressive at the point of diagnosis, enabling them to give him the best targeted treatment quickly before it spreads and becomes too late to cure.
Tim says it's transformative:
"If we can catch the disease early in it's life cycle we can stop it in it's tracks."
The research is led by Professor Ros Eeles at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, with the team including world-leading experts from around the UK
The project team has collected data from blood and tumour samples from 2000 men with prostate cancer across nine countries. They will now use advanced artificial intelligence to analyse this huge amount of data, looking for genetic patterns that will unlock answers to which DNA changes are linked to aggressive cancers that spread quickly. With this, they’ll develop an AI model that can predict whether a man’s cancer is likely to be aggressive, based on a simple blood sample.
Every 45 minutes one man dies from prostate cancer, and too many are finding out they have the disease by chance, often when it has spread and becomes harder to treat. Prostate Cancer UK is calling on people to continue to support the charity and this life-saving research.
Tim feels the same thing that's happened for breast cancer awareness, need to happen for prostate cancer:
"It's too much like an iceberg at the moment, it's below the water line, people just don't really recognise it."
As well as The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), the research team comprises world-leading experts from the University of East Anglia, the University of Manchester, the University of Oxford, The Sanger Genome Centre and the University of Cambridge.