Of all the transformational possibilities of artificial intelligence, perhaps the most exciting for many people is its potential to help beat deadly disease – including cancer. But harnessing that potential takes expert multidisciplinary work. At Queen’s University Belfast, data scientists are working together with clinicians, physicists, radiation biologists, radiographers and physiologists to drive groundbreaking improvements in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and patients’ quality of life.
The university is also leading the way in promoting the power of cross-border data-sharing to improve healthcare, as a partner in a project working to link clinical, pathological, genomic and socioeconomic patient-data from across the island of Ireland. The aim is to help unlock more comprehensive cancer care and research. While traditional cancer therapies tend to be delivered with a one-size-fits-all approach, Queen’s researchers are focused on developing personalised medicine tailored to a patient’s genetic or molecular makeup, or the characteristics of a tumour.
Using computer science to process vast amounts of data, they aim to identify biomarkers – biological molecules found in blood, other body fluids or tissue – that may be able to predict how the disease will progress, or how likely different treatments are to succeed. That means not just that patients can benefit from getting the most effective treatment from the start, but also that they can avoid suffering the side effects of a therapy that was never likely to work for them.
“We want to be more precise with our treatments, first directing the right treatment to the right patients, and then delivering that treatment as precisely as possible,” says Prof Suneil Jain, of the Prostate Cancer Centre of Excellence, a clinical research facility that’s part of the university’s Patrick G Johnston Centre for Cancer Research.
The centre’s biomarker team is currently exploring the use of AI to analyse data in digital pathology images – digitised versions of the glass slides of biopsies that are traditionally studied under a microscope – to find patterns that could show which cancers will behave more aggressively, and which are likely to respond better to the hormone therapy often offered as treatment.
While it’s early days, an eventual clinical trial could see marked benefits for patients: prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in the UK – affecting one in eight – and the second most common cause of cancer deaths in men, so the potential to improve quality of life is significant. “Hormonal therapies have a number of side effects, including fatigue, weight gain, erectile dysfunction, hot flushes and problems with thinking and memory,” Jain says. “If we can avoid those for some patients by using a predictive biomarker, that would be a really big improvement in how we treat localised prostate cancer.”
Radiomics – the study of big data in scans – also offers opportunities for precision medicine and here prostate cancer data scientists at Queen’s have focused on CT scanning among patients having radiotherapy. “The idea of a CT scan or an MRI scan is to show you if there’s a lump or a bump, a recurrence or a metastasis,” says Prof Joe O’Sullivan, Jain’s co-director at the centre of excellence. “But that’s just looking at the scan on the screen. We now know that if you deep dive into these scans, you find incredible amounts of data that provide much richer information.”
At the centre’s heart is its clinic and patients – and it’s their willingness to get onboard with clinical trials that has contributed to successes, including “stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy” (SABR) – which delivers treatment in just five hospital visits rather than the typical 20 – and a pioneering new combination of radiotherapies that has improved the treatment of very advanced prostate cancer.
Referrals come to the Thursday morning new patient clinic from all over Northern Ireland, and sometimes from south of the border too. “A big focus for us, as well as making sure they get the best possible treatment, is having a clinical trial option if possible, whether someone’s presenting with early curable disease, is relapsing, or has very advanced prostate cancer,” say O’Sullivan.
“We love the idea that pre-clinical scientific ideas generated in our own laboratories, where our strengths are data science and radiation science, can then be tested on our patients. Our patients get this very quickly: that we have research and innovation at our core.”
Prostate cancer takes a heavy toll not just on patients but on their wider families. “When a husband or a father gets a cancer diagnosis, everything else stops,” Jain says. But thanks to the kind of research Queen’s is spearheading, the outcomes are getting better and better. And for the patients who its teams work with, being able to play a part in that has benefits beyond the treatment.
“What I really like about it, especially when I meet patients who are coming in scared out of their wits, is the hope that it gives them,” says O’Sullivan. “First of all, that there may be a clinical trial that might suit them, but also that we are involved in advancing the field. As a clinician for 25 years, I really feel that hope is the ‘X factor’ when you’re trying to treat these patients.”
Discover more cutting-edge research from Queen’s University Belfast
