TRO Blog: Personalised Therapy for Prostate Cancer from Diagnosis, Devices & Diagnostics TIN

In this first Devices & Diagnostics TIN interview as part of the Early Career Innovators series, acknowledging the amazing translational work being done by early career researchers within the UCL Therapeutic Innovation Networks (TINs), Dr Hayley Pye highlights her Devices & Diagnostics TIN Pilot Data Fund awarded project, “Personalising pathology for prostate cancer, a unique opportunity at UCL/UCLH”.

Prostate cancer is the 2nd most common cause of cancer death in males in the UK with over 11,000 men dying each year. Around 350 people are diagnosed with prostate cancer every day. In the UK there are no molecular profiling tests recommended for risk profiling or treatment selection. Despite high quality research in this area, molecular tests to diagnose only the more aggressive cancers that require treatment are largely unadopted.

Dr Hayley Pye and team's device will provide a completely novel way to implement personalised diagnosis and pave the way for the implementation of these tests. They are looking to apply machine learning techniques to these whole-slide-images (WSI) and predict for clinically actionable genetic mutations or pathway activation in prostate cancer. This would promote personalised therapy from the point of diagnosis. The teams network provides a unique environment to test this in clinical hands and in real life clinical data sets that are relevant to the target population.

Read the full interview