Last year more than 40,000 people in Ireland were diagnosed with cancer. Each of those people had better access to tools to fight the disease than ever before.
Precision medicine is an approach to cancer treatment that allows doctors to select medications based on the genetic makeup of the individual cancer. A doctor won't just treat lung cancer, they'll specify the type of lung cancer you have, down to the specific abnormal genes and proteins it produces. This means that specifying cancer and treatment regimens will not just involve histology and radiology processes, but will also include gene sequencing for the specific patient. It is through advances in AI and big data that this gene sequencing is possible, mapping a patient's unique genes in a fraction of the time usually taken for traditional sequencing.
AI is being used by pharmaceutical companies to accelerate drug trials and identify which drug regimens are likely to succeed before submitting to full clinical testing. This saves time and money in delivering cures to the patient and prevents companies from wasting years on developing drugs that would ultimately fail at the end of development.
Just recently, an Irish oncology app which provides a search engine for clinical trials was launched. The search engine feature will be added to the go-to oncology appONCO assist, which enables oncology clinicians to access relevant, up-to-date tools and content via their smart devices. Demand for a search engine tool was identified through engaging with the company's community of more than 13,000 users across 170 countries, as well as through close collaboration with Cancer Trials Ireland. The search engine was funded by the HSE to the tune of €25,000,awarded under the QIC digital innovation programme.
Other features on this app include adjuvant tools, formulae,prognostic scores, standard toxicity criteria for adverse events, drug information and a drug intervention checker.The search engine is now available across Ireland.
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