How data-driven medicine helps provide personalised care to cancer patients

Dr Aleksandra Filipovic tells Computing how Sophia Genetics bioinformatics and machine learning are providing improved patient care

It wasn't long ago that personalised medicine seemed like a far-fetched dream, something confined to the realms of science-fiction.

Now, however, data-driven medicine powered by bioinformatics and machine learning means personalised medical cures are very much science-fact. Indeed, healthcare firms and universities are investing in technologies such as big data and informatics to sequence the genomes of individual patients.

Dr Aleksandra Filipovic, a clinical fellow of medical oncology, has been practicing medicine for eight years and is an advocate of using the latest computer technology in healthcare.

"My focus is on bringing new technologies and medical innovation into practice for patient benefit," she told Computing.

Filipovic described how there's been "an explosion in the need for and awareness of personalised medicine" in the past two years, "especially when it comes to the application of next generation sequencing".

The data is there to "give us confidence that personalised medicine is really the way to go forward", she said and explained how this will bring benefits to cancer patients.

"We need to be prescribing the right drug to the right person at the right time and to make our diagnoses as early as possible and as accurate as possible and the benefits in all these aspects are certainly huge," she said.

Sophia Genetics is data analysis and software firm that helps healthcare providers deliver more personalised healthcare. Dr Filipovic described Sophia's work as "quite different and unique to anything we'd encountered before" but that the benefits have been vast.

"They enable our oncology practice to use their data-driven platform in order to be able to implement genetic sequencing into their daily practice," she said. But use of such technology in the health service isn't simple, Dr Filipovic told Computing.

"The whole concept of using genetic sequencing in routine practice can be very cumbersome, it can be difficult for a hospital, a lab or an academic centre because it's a complex process, it has a lot of quality restraints, it's costly and it can be cumbersome to coordinate," she said, adding how data interpretation and data storage are considered "the biggest obstacle".

However, oncologists have able to overcome these obstacles through outsourcing to Sophia Genetics, something that Dr Filipovic said enables clinical labs to "reduce costs and overcome the complexity and fulfil the quality constraints related to next generation sequencing in clinics".

Using Sophia Genetics technology this way allows cancer clinics to use "advanced algorithms and machine learning to obtain the highest accuracy" in diagnoses and treatment, which ultimately results in the ability to "interpret the data in the most relevant possible way for that particular patient".

Filipovic was keen to stress how all of the data collected is anonymised, but by storing it in databases, it benefits health providers not just within the UK, but across the world.

"Clinicians can share their collective knowledge of genetic sequences and illnesses in a secure network," she said, explaining how "really where Sophia Genetics comes into play is that all of the centres, academics and clinicians that are plugged into the network have this knowledge available live".

"We're able to learn from one another and that saves us a lot of time, enabling us to accelerate the implementation of these genetic findings for the daily clinical work," she added.

Using data analysis software has also enabled researchers to set up a lab in a matter of weeks when "it used to take years", with a "very fast turnaround" for an output of treatment that is "precise, accurate and to the point for that patient".

Data-driven medicine is apparently bringing benefits to doctors and clinicians, but how do the patients feel about it? Dr Filipovic told Computing that patients welcome their genetic data being analysed in order to research improved treatments.

"Obviously when one does a genetic test, one has an extensive and frank conversation with the patient to understand the implications," she said.

And certainly I've found patients derive comfort from knowing that their care is being personalised and that they'll be getting diagnostics and treatment suited to themselves," Filipovic concluded.