Making sense of cancer's 'big data' problem to revolutionise patient care

The Mark Foundation Institute for Integrated Cancer Medicine will be funded by an £8.6 million award to the University of Cambridge from The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research – the first time that the New York-based philanthropic organisation has made an award to a UK institution. The virtual institute aims to exploit recent advances in big data processing and machine learning to capture and integrate clinical, genomic, and image data collated from hundreds of cancer patients in real-time. Laboratory and clinic-based researchers and data experts will work together to determine whether sophisticated computational integration of all these diverse data types into a single platform can inform and predict the best treatment decisions for each individual patient. Blood tests, biopsies, medical imaging, and genetic tests are a routine part of current cancer care; however, it is not always clear which of these increasingly large datasets are most important in guiding treatment at specific points in the patient journey. "Doctors have long dreamed of an objective system that can integrate all the results generated from their cancer patients, guiding comprehensive treatment decisions both for current treatment and to predict how a particular disease will behave in the future," explains Professor Richard Gilbertson, Director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre where the new institute will be based.