PhenMap tool could spare thousands of patients from treatment that would be ineffective for them
A new AI-driven way of identifying how patients with advanced bowel cancer will respond to a drug that was recently introduced by the NHS has been announced.
Researchers at London’s Institute of Cancer Research and the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences in Dublin have developed the method with the goal of sparing potentially thousands of patients from being given drugs that would be ineffective in fighting their cancers.
In the UK alone, nearly 10,000 cases of advanced bowel cancer are identified every year, with young adults seeing a particular rise in diagnoses. Bowel cancer has the second highest mortality rate of any cancer, behind only lung cancer, and while survival rates can be as high as 98% when caught early, the five-year survival rate for advanced bowel cancer can be as low as 10%.
The study tracked 117 European bowel cancer patients who had been treated with chemotherapy and bevacizumab, a drug that was approved by the NHS in December. Bevacizumab works by slowing the rate at which cancer develops by depriving tumours of the proteins that they need to grow, but is only effective for a small pool of patients, and carries serious side-effects such as blood clots and gastrointestinal issues.
