“Towards intelligent personalised cancer treatment via Artificial Intelligence”Professor Gordon McVie, Chair of the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine, UK |
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Abstract
If any disease were susceptible to mathematical unravelling, it should be cancer. After all, there is a cancer genome, and nearly a cancer epigenome, and maybe a cancer proteome. Research in this area has been funded more generously than any area of medicine since Nixon’s War against Cancer. So what’s stopping us? There are simply too few tangible markers which accurately predict propensity to get cancer, or prognosis, or best treatment strategies, or resistance to those therapies. There is no device on any clever Apple or Google wrist watch which can shine a light on any of these issues. But biomarkers are emerging slowly, and will make a positive impact in the next decade.
Meanwhile most European cancer doctors can’t access the existing molecular information buried in the common cancers due to cost. The explosion of links of gene mutations to specially designed medicines or vaccines has been unaffordable outside the big cancer centres.
But while prices come down, AI research can feast on simpler challenges. Each cancer patient will have a large file full of simple cheap information- H&E stained pathology slides, CT scans, maybe MRI too, and numerous haematological, biochemical and immunological data, obtained in under a minute for miniscule monies. Data on treatment by surgery, radiotherapy and systemic therapeutics, with accompanying side effects and accurate dates of death, are highly likely to unravel algorithms which will help make cancer treatments more intelligent, and more personalised.
The main block in this simple science is the ignorance of doctors who are frequently bereft of up to date mathematics, buried as they too frequently are in a silo which contains information about one cancerous organ and one modality of therapy. So while the AI specialists get busy dissecting subcellular characteristics of all cancers, simple cross talk between clinicians, imprisoned in their comfortable silos, and those AI experts, will yield low cost applicable results in the short term. My talk will illustrate successes and failures in AI in cancer.
Bio
Professor Gordon McVie is widely regarded as a leading international authority in the research and treatment of cancer. Having qualified in the nineteen sixties in science and medicine at Edinburgh University, he was appointed Foundation Senior Lecturer at the Cancer Research Campaign oncology unit at the University of Glasgow in 1975. He trained in the US, and spent sabbaticals in Paris, Sydney and Amsterdam.
He has been visiting professor at Cancer Studies, Kings College London for five years, and is currently Clinical Research Adviser to the FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology (IFOM). He is founding editor of ecancer.org and ecancerpatient.org both online Open Access free websites., with almost 21 million visits in a decade from 191 countries.
For ten years he was Senior Consultant building clinical research at the European Institute of Oncology, Milan,
Previously Professor McVie was Chief Executive of the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC), which, under his aegis, took over seventy molecules from the lab into clinical trial. He led CRC into a merger with Imperial Cancer Research Fund which formed Cancer Research UK, in 2002, and was joint CEO with Sir Paul Nurse.
Throughout the Eighties, he was Clinical Research Director at the National Cancer Institute of the Netherlands and set up their drug discovery programme and the leading intraperitoneal chemotherapy studies in Europe .
As President of EORTC, he set up the present Drug Development Group in Brussels, and with NCI support, the European New Drug Development Network. He followed Sir Walter Bodmer as Chair of the UICC Fellowships Programme in 1990 and held the post for eight years.
In the UK he was one of the architects of the Cancer Trials Networks in Scotland, Wales, and England, and was a founding member of the National Cancer Research Institute.
Professor McVie is the recipient of numerous awards and has honorary doctorates in science and medicine from six universities. He has served on key committees of AACR and ASCO, and on the boards of the National Cancer Institutes of France, Italy, and Holland. He has authored 360 peer-reviewed articles, and contributed to over 35 books.
His commitment to drug discovery and delivery is evidenced by approximately 240 patents granted to CRC scientists under his leadership, several drugs registered including carboplatin, temozolomide, olaparib and abiraterone and the foundation of 10 biotechnology companies based on CRC intellectual property. His clinical interests, apart from new drug discovery and chemoprevention, are in the management of cancers of the lung, ovary, liver, breast and brain.
He is chair of ORIL in Australia, and chair of Cancer Intelligence; plus non executive director of Ellipses Pharma, a new Phase 1 cancer trials company, founded by Sir Chris Evans, the well known UK entrepreneur.
He was elected as Fellow of the European Association for Cancer Science in 2014, and has been chairman of the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine since early 2016.
He lives in Bristol, UK, with his wife Claudia who was Chief Executive of the cancer charity Tenovus Cancer Care.