Breast cancer therapy project secures £1m Innovate UK grant

A new breast cancer therapy project has secured a £1m grant from the UK’s innovation agency Innovate UK.

AI-VISION project, a collaborative project between Durham, the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), the Royal Marsden Hospital and techbio company Concr, is hoped to play a pivotal role in advancing precision medicine.

The initiative will support clinical decision-making, including directing breast cancer patients on the use of immunotherapy.

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in the UK, accounting for 15 per cent of all new cancer cases. Around 55,000 women in the UK are diagnosed with breast cancer every year.

AI-VISION is a 24-month observational clinical study that aims to assess tissue samples from patients with early triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), a kind of breast cancer that does not have any of the receptors that are commonly found in breast cancer.

The participants will be analysed to define and establish chemotherapy response biomarkers, irrespective of immunotherapy status.

The study aims to validate the safety and performance of new computational methods to offer precision therapies for patients.

Concr says it apply Bayesian computational frameworks, inspired by astrophysics, to interconnect diverse oncology data, helping researchers to detect and develop biomarkers indicative of drug response.

The ICR will contribute genomic data from its genomics facility, which will be integrated with clinical findings from TNBC samples through Concr’s FarrSight platform.

The current TNBC treatment protocol typically involves physicians making treatment choices based on clinical and pathology findings.

However, despite significant strides in molecular genomic profiling, no licensed platform presently exists that links tumour molecular data with drug response predictions for TNBC.

“It’s exciting to announce our new partnership, which is bringing together experts in cancer, genomics, astrophysics and artificial intelligence for an innovative project that is seeking to improve treatment for triple-negative breast cancer,” said Dr Navita Somaiah, clinician-scientist at the Institute of Cancer Research London and Royal Marsden clinical oncologist and project lead.

“The aim of our project is to uncover new potential ways to treat triple-negative breast cancer more effectively, by combining data from a variety of different sources and analysing it using AI.

“We hope to uncover genomic characteristics that indicate sensitivity to immunotherapy and could guide us to selecting the patients most likely to benefit from these newer therapies.”